The chief feature of the palm tribe consists in the cylindrical trunk crowned by a mass of large and somewhat rigid leaves. They vary in height from a few feet to that of the loftiest forest-trees. Some are stemless, consisting only of a spreading crown of large pinnate leaves; but the great majority have a trunk slender in proportion to its height. Some of the smaller species have stems no thicker than a lead pencil, and four or five feet high; while the great Mauritia of the Amazon has a trunk full two feet in diameter, and more than 100 feet high. Some species probably reach a height of 200 feet, for Humboldt states that in South America he measured a palm, which was 192 English feet high. The leaves of palms are often of immense size. Those of the _Manicaria saccifera_ of Para are thirty feet long and four or five feet wide, and are not pinnate but entire and very rigid. Some of the pinnate leaves are much larger, those of the _Raphia tædigera_ and _Maximiliana regia_ being both sometimes more than fifty feet long. The fan-shaped leaves of other species are ten or twelve feet in diameter. The trunks of palms are sometimes smooth and more or less regularly ringed, but they are frequently armed with dense prickles which are sometimes eight inches long. In some species, the leaves fall to the ground as they decay leaving a clean scar, but in most cases they are persistent, rotting slowly away, and leaving a mass of fibrous stumps attached to the upper part of the stem. This rotting mass forms an excellent soil for ferns, orchids, and other semi-parasitical plants, which form an attractive feature on what would otherwise be an unsightly object. The sheathing margins of the leaves often break up into a fibrous material, sometimes resembling a coarse cloth, and in other cases more like horsehair. The flowers are not individually large, but form large spikes or racemes, and the fruits are often beautifully scaled and hang in huge bunches which are sometimes more than a load for a strong man. The climbing palms are very remarkable, their tough, slender, prickly stems mounting up by means of the hooked midribs of the leaves to the tops of the loftiest forest-trees, above which they send up an elegant spike of foliage and flowers. The most important are the American _Desmoncus_ and the Eastern _Calamus_, the latter being the well-known rattan or cane of which chair-seats are made, from the Malay name “rotang.” The rattan-palms are the largest and most remarkable of the climbing group. They are very abundant in the drier equatorial forests, and more than sixty species are known from the Malay Archipelago. The stems (when cleaned from the sheathing leaves and prickles) vary in size from the thickness of a quill to that of the wrist; and where abundant they render the forest almost impassable. They lie about the ground coiled and twisted and looped in the most fantastic manner. They hang in festoons from trees and branches, they rise suddenly through