Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 60.djvu/396

388 turned on a lathe, tapering from base to summit and crowned by clusters of plumy fronds more than a hundred feet from the ground. I do not know just how old these trees are, but a hundred years or so, 1 have been told; nor how tall they are, but that one can see for himself; and the height is certainly impressive. The kind of palms forming this particular avenue (Oreodoxa oleracea) has been extensively planted in parks and in public and large private grounds since the stately groups at the Botanical Gardens came to be appreciated more than half a century ago. To-day these trees are to be seen in most of the capitals and larger cities all over Brazil.

But the Brazilians think of palms more seriously as useful in other ways than as landscape ornaments. Indeed, to the traveler in the interior of Brazil, one of the most striking things about palms is the great number of uses to which they are put, uses extending to all parts of the plant. It is a matter of great importance in the tropics that plants bear their fruits and yield their other products with but little or no labor on the part of man, and this the palms all do. To mention all their uses in a short article is quite impossible. It is said of the coco palm, for instance, that it has a use for every day in the year, and whether this be true or not, it is near enough the truth to illustrate the point; and it is no extravagant statement of its virtues. Out of more than a hundred species of Brazilian palms upon which I made notes there is hardly one that has not some special and important use.

To the casual observer it might appear that palms are plants of such marked characters that there would be no difficulty in distinguishing the species. At least that was my own impression when I first walked through an Amazonian forest and observed the apparently wide differences between them. But as one's acquaintance with palms widens he finds them to be very like other organisms in their similarities and dissimilarities.

The Palm Trunk.—Palms vary enormously in size, shape, habit and habitat. The largest are the royal palms which reach a height of nearly two hundred feet with a perfectly straight, smooth and symmetrically tapering trunk over a meter in diameter at the base. The smallest are the Geonomas and certain species of Bactris, slender delicate plants but little more than a meter in height, with a trunk not larger than an ordinary lead pencil. Still others have no trunks at all above the ground, but the leaves and fruits rise from a short stock concealed beneath the soil very like a bulb.

The jacitára (Desmoncus) has a trunk the size of a man's finger and a length of a hundred feet or more, a form that is unable to stand erect, but sprawls or clambers over other plants like a vine. Some