Chief among palms stands the cohune (_Attalea cohune_), known also as manàca and corozo. When young, the palm has no stem, its enormous leaves rising from the ground more than thirty feet. The rhachis, or midrib, of the pinnate fronds is of a rich red color, and larger round than a man’s wrist, the distinct, conduplicate divisions being long and broad. Mr. Morris estimates a leaf he saw in British Honduras at sixty feet in length and eight feet in breadth. I have never seen one more than forty feet long and five wide; but this is not an uncommon size of the manàca as it is cut for thatching, one leaf extending across the roof. After remaining some years in the manàca state, the stem begins to elongate, and as it rises, the leaves become smaller, as is the case with the coconut and other palms so far as known. The leaf-stems are persistent, giving the tree a rough, untidy look, but doubtless having a purpose to fulfil in the economy of Nature. This palm is now known as corozo, and begins to fruit. The male inflorescence is an immense mass of more than thirty thousand staminate flowers in a compound raceme between four and five feet long; these have a heavy, not disagreeable odor, and attract a great many bees and wasps, so that on one occasion the mozo who climbed the stem and cut for me a fine specimen was badly stung. These insects were so persistent after a great deal of shaking that the camera was used as quickly as possible, specimens were saved, and the spadix was, with the too-attractive flowers, thrown into the river. The pollen, which under the microscope shows a form exactly like a baker’s roll, is in such abundance from the four hundred and fifty thousand stamens that it would fill a pint measure. The spathe, or cover of the inflorescence, looks like leather, is deeply furrowed on the outside, and would make a commodious bath-tub for a child. The fertile spadix has shorter branches, with the rather large flowers succeeded by from five to ten nuts, the whole bunch, which is about five feet long and weighs more than a hundred pounds, bearing from eight hundred to a thousand nuts. These nuts are two and a half inches long, and covered with a fibrous husk and so thick a shell that the valuable kernel cannot be extracted in quantity without powerful and expensive machinery. Like the coconut, the fruit is normally three-celled. But as in that palm two of the cells give up the struggle for existence in early life, so in the cohune; and I have never, in the scores of nuts opened, found more than one cell. Professor Watson has noticed two cells in several specimens, but never three. In the illustration of this palm the bunch of nearly ripe nuts is clearly shown, and in the diagram of flowers and fruit the fibrous husks and the abortive cells may be seen. The natives crush the ripe nuts between stones, and after pounding the rather small kernel in a mahogany mortar, boil the resulting cake until the oil floats; this is skimmed off and