We will begin with Palms[85], the loftiest and most stately of all vegetable forms. To these, above all other trees, the prize of beauty has always been awarded by every nation; and it was from the Asiatic palm-world, or the adjacent countries, that human civilization sent forth the first rays of its early dawn. Marked with rings, and not unfrequently armed with thorns, the tall and slender shaft of this graceful tree rears on high its crown of shining, fan-like, or pinnated leaves, which are often curled like those of some gramineæ. Smooth stems of the palm, which I carefully measured, rose to a height of 190 feet. The palm diminishes in size and beauty as it recedes from the equatorial towards the temperate zones. Europe owns amongst its indigenous trees only one representative of this form of vegetation, the dwarfish coast palm (_Chamæops_), which, in Spain and Italy, is found as far north as 44° lat. The true palm climate has a mean annual temperature of 78° to 81°.5 Fahr., but the date-palm, which has been brought to us from Africa, and is less beautiful than other species of this family, vegetates in the south of Europe in districts whose mean temperature is only from 59° to 62°.4 Fahr. Stems of palms and skeletons of elephants are found buried in the interior of the earth in Northern Europe; their position renders it probable that they were not drifted from the tropics towards the north, but that, in the great revolutions of our planet, climates, and the physiognomy of nature which is regulated by climate, have been, in many respects, altered. In all regions of the earth the palm is found associated with the plantain or banana; the _Scitamineæ_ and _Musaceæ_ of botanists, _Heliconia_, _Amomum_, and _Strelitzia_. This form has a low, succulent, and almost herbaceous stem, the summit of which is crowned with delicately striped, silky, shining leaves of a thin and loose texture. Groves of bananas form the ornament of humid regions; and on their fruit the natives of the torrid zone chiefly depend for subsistence. Like the farinaceous cereals or corn-yielding plants of the north, the banana has accompanied man from the earliest infancy of his civilization[86]. By some Semitic traditions the primitive seat of these nutritious tropical plants has been placed on the shores of the Euphrates, and by others, with greater probability, in India, at the foot of the Himalaya mountains. Greek legends cite the plains of Enna as the home of the cereals. Whilst, however, the cereals, spread by culture over the northern regions, in monotonous and far extending tracts, add but little to the beauty of the landscape; the inhabitant of the tropics, on the other hand, is enabled, by the propagation of the banana, to multiply one of the noblest and most lovely of vegetable productions.