Besides the height of the shaft, the position of the leaves serves chiefly to impart a more or less majestic character to the palms: those with drooping leaves being far less stately than those whose fronds shoot more or less upwards to the skies. Nothing can exceed the elegance of the Jagua palm, which along with the splendid Cucurito adorns the granite rocks in the rapids of the Orinoco at Atures. The fronds, which are but few in number, rise almost perpendicularly sixteen feet high, from the top of the lofty columnar shaft, and their feathery leaflets of a thin and grass-like texture play lightly round the tall leaf-stalks, slowly bending in the breeze. In the palms with a feathery foliage, the leaf-stalks rise either immediately from a brown ligneous trunk (cocoa-nut, date), or, as in the beautiful Palma Real of the Havana, from a smooth, slender, and grass-green shaft, placed like an additional column upon the dark-coloured trunk. In the fan-palms, the crown frequently rests upon a layer of dried leaves, which impart a severe character to the tree. [Illustration: YRIARTEA VENTRICOSA.] The form of the trunk also varies greatly; sometimes it is extremely short, as in _Chamæropshumilis_; and sometimes, as in the ratans, assumes a bush-rope appearance. In some species it is smooth and unarmed, in others rugged or bristling with spines. In the American Yriarteas it rests upon a number of roots rising above the ground. Thus the _Y. exorrhiza_, frequently stands upon a dozen or more supports, embracing a circumference of twenty feet; and the _Y. ventricosa_ is still more curious, as the spindle-shaped trunk, which at both ends is scarce a foot thick, swells in the middle to a threefold diameter, and, from its convenient form, is frequently used by the Indians for the construction of their canoes. The form and colour of the fruits is also extremely various. What a difference between the large double nuts of the Lodoicea and the date-- between the egg-shaped fruits of the Mauritia, whose scaly rind gives them the appearance of fir-cones, and the gold and purple peaches of the Pirijao, hanging in colossal clusters of sixty or eighty from the summit of the majestic trunk.