its swollen, bulb-like stem when young, its tall, straight trunk when full grown, its cluster of heavy fruit, and its long, plume-like, drooping flower;[26] the Coccoeiro, with its slighter trunk and pendant branches of small berry-like fruit; the Palmetto, with its tender succulent bud on the summit of the stem, which is used as a vegetable here, and makes an excellent substitute for cabbage; the thorny Icaree or Cari, a variety of fan-palms, with their leaves cut like ribbons; and very many others, each with its characteristic foliage and appearance.[27] The mountains along the road, as indeed throughout the neighborhood of Rio, are of very peculiar forms, steep and conical, suggesting at first sight a volcanic origin. It is this abruptness of outline which gives so much grandeur to mountain ranges here, the average height of which does not exceed two or three thousand feet. A closer examination of their structure shows that their wild, fantastic forms are the result of the slow processes of disintegration, not of sudden convulsions. Indeed, the rocks here differ so much in external character from those of the Northern Hemisphere, that the European geologist stands at first bewildered before them, and feels that the work of his life is to be done over again. It is some time before he obtains a clew to the facts and brings them into harmony with his previous knowledge. Thus far Mr. Agassiz finds himself painfully perplexed by this new aspect of phenomena so familiar to him in other regions, but so baffling here. He comes upon a rock, for instance, or a rounded elevation which by its outline he would suppose to be a “roche moutonnée,” but approaching it more nearly he finds a decomposed crust instead of a glaciated surface. It is the same with the loose materials corresponding to the drift of the Northern hemisphere, and with all boulders or detached masses of rock; on account of their disintegration wherever they are exposed to the atmosphere, nothing is to be learned from their external appearance. There is not a natural surface of rock, unless recently broken, to be found anywhere.