Page:Aspects of nature in different lands and different climates; with scientific elucidations (IA b29329668 0002).pdf/146

 *[Footnote: trees." I have already spoken in the first volume of the present work, p. 216, of these beautiful fruits, of which there are seventy or eighty in a bunch, and which can be prepared as food in a variety of ways, like plantains and potatoes.

In some species of Palms the flower sheath, or spathe surrounding the spadix and the flowers, opens suddenly with an audible sound. Richard Schomburgk (Reisen in Britisch Guiana, Th. i. S. 55) has like myself observed this phenomenon in the flowering of the Oreodoxa oleracea. This first opening of the flowers of Palms accompanied by sound recalls the vernal Dithyrambus of Pindar, and the moment when, in Argive Nemea, "the first opening shoot of the date-palm proclaims the arrival of balmy spring." (Kosmos, Bd. ii. S. 10; Eng. ed. p. 10.)

Three vegetable forms of peculiar beauty are proper to the tropical zone in all parts of the globe; Palms, Plantains or Bananas, and Arborescent Ferns. It is where heat and moisture are combined that vegetation is most vigorous, and its forms most varied; and hence South America excels the rest of the tropical world in the number and beauty of her species of Palms. In Asia this form of vegetation is more rare, perhaps because a considerable part of the Indian continent which was situated immediately under the equinoctial line has been broken up and covered by the sea in the course of former geological revolutions. We know scarcely anything of the palm trees of Africa between the Bight of Benin and the Coast of Ajan; and, generally]*