Here, too, grows the slender and graceful assai-palm, with its perfectly smooth trunk,—the fruit appearing in a heavy cluster of berries just below the cluster of leaves on its summit. The stem is hard and tough as horn, and is much made use of, when split into narrow planks, for the construction of walls and flooring of houses.
The fruit is about the size of a cranberry, and of a dark brown colour. When boiled and crushed it yields a quantity of juice of about the consistency of chocolate, somewhat of the colour of blackberry juice, when it has a sweetish taste—and is eaten, made into cakes with the flour of the mandioca root. From it also is formed the favourite beverage of the people. To obtain the fruit, the native fastens a strip of palm-leaves round his instep, thus binding his feet together, to enable him to climb the slippery trunk, which he does with wonderful rapidity, to obtain the fruit at its summit.
Wherever a native village exists, there are seen growing in clusters, beautiful ornaments beside the palm-thatched huts, the tall and elegant pupunha, or peach palm—Guilielma speciosa—to the height of sixty feet, and often perfectly straight. A single bunch of the fruit weighs as much as a man can carry, and on each tree several are borne. It takes its name from the colour of the fruit, not from its flavour or nature, for it is dry and mealy, and may be compared in taste to a mixture of chestnuts and cheese. It is eagerly devoured by vultures, who come in quarrelsome flocks to the trees when it is ripe. Dogs often feed on it. It is one of the few trees which the natives brought with them, it is said, from their original home, and have here cultivated from time immemorial. The fruit, when boiled, is nearly as mealy as a potato; and in perfection is the size of a large peach. It is generally supposed that there is more nutriment in the fruit than in fish,—about a dozen forming a meal for a grown-up person. The leaves of its crown are evenly arched over, forming a deep green vault—the more beautiful from the rich colour of the foliage. When the heavy cluster of ripe red fruit hangs under its dark vault, the tree is in its greatest beauty.
The palms are among the most characteristic features of tropical scenery. The variety of their forms, fruit, foliage, and flowers is perfectly bewildering, and yet as a group their character is unmistakable. On the whole, no family of trees is more similar; generically and specifically, none is more varied. Their leaves follow the simple arrangement of those of grasses, in which the leaves are placed alternately on opposite sides of the stem, thus dividing the space round it in halves. As the stem of the branches elongates, these pairs of leaves are found scattered along its length, and it is only in the ears, or spikes of some genera, that we find them growing so compactly on the axis as to form a close head.
Of this law of growth the palm known as the baccaba is an admirable illustration, its leaves being disposed in pairs one above another at the summit of the stem, but in such immediate contact as to form a thick crown. Its appearance is in consequence totally different from any other palm, except
perhaps the jacitara, which has a slender, winding stem. Sometimes the crown is more open, as in the inaja—Maximiliana regia—in which the stem is not very high, and the leaves grow in cycles of five, separating slightly, so as to form an open vase rising from a slender stem.
Professor Agassiz remarks that the rest of this tropical forest is as interesting to the geologist as to the botanist, as it reveals to him its relation to the vegetable world of past ages, showing those laws of growth which unite the past and the present.
The tree-ferns—the chamaerops, the pandanus, the araucarias—are modern representatives of past types. The former is a palm belonging to the ancient vegetable world, but having its representative in our days. The modern chamaerops, with its fan-like leaves spreading on one level, stands, with respect to its structure, lower than the palms with pinnate leaves, which belong almost exclusively to our geological age, and have numerous leaflets ranging along either side of a central axis. The young palms, while their elders tower fifty feet above them, are often not more than two inches high; and to whatever genus they may belong, invariably resemble the chamaerops,—having their leaves extending fan-like on one plane, instead of being scattered along a central axis, as in the adult tree. The infant palm is, in fact, the mature chamaerops in miniature; showing that among plants, as among animals—at least in some instances—there is a correspondence between the youngest stages of growth in the higher species of a given type, and the earliest introduction of that type on earth.