Another and more massive Palm appears, where a moment ago there was nothing but smooth ground and empty air. It is the Sugar Palm (_Saguerus saccharifer_), remarkable in its appearance for the swathes of what looks to be _sackcloth of hair_, in which its stem is enveloped. Each of its great pinnate leaves forms with the dilated base of its midrib a broad sheath, which springs out of a loose fold of this coarse cloth that is wrapped around it. And not only the bases of the still flourishing leaves are swathed in this natural textile fabric, but the dead and dry leaf-bases of the former leaves, which may be traced all down the stem. But let us look at this strange cloth: what is it? It is composed of the exterior fibres of the leaf-bases themselves, which in process of growth have partially separated themselves, and from which the parenchyma and the lamina have decayed away. The appearance of a woven fabric is deceptive; there is no interlacing; but its semblance is produced by the fibres lying in layers one over the other, and by some of them having a direction at right angles to the others. Originally all the fibres were parallel and longitudinal, but as they have been, in the growth of the leaf, pulled out laterally, the main fibres, which are indefinitely divisible, have adhered to each other at various parts, and the result has been that innumerable constituent fibrillae have been stretched across from fibre to fibre. Every square inch, then, of this sackcloth tells of the lapse of time; these horse-hair-like fibres were once green and vascular, enclosing a soft pulp; in short, they were a part of a verdant leaf; the reduction of each congeries of veins to this condition was a work of time, and this has been effected by many leaf-bases in succession. An examination of this _gomuti_, as it is called, does not indeed help us to identify the actual interval lapsed in the history of the plant; but we may arrive at this from other considerations. The great sheathing bases themselves remain in numbers attached to the upper portion of the stem, though the greater portion of the midrib with the pinnae has decayed and fallen; and in the lower part, where even the bases have disappeared, still broad lateral scars are left, marking off the stipe into horizontal rings, which are not less conclusively certain evidences of the former existence of similar bases, and therefore, still earlier, of leaves.