agility with which they will climb any height when prompted by their own inclination, as, for instance, in the pursuit of a parrot, an iguana, or a monkey, which, wounded by their arrows, saves itself from falling by its prehensile tail. In the month of January the stems of the _Palma Real_, our _Oreodoxa Regia_, were covered with snow-white blossoms, in all the most frequented thoroughfares of the Havannah, and in the immediate vicinity of the city; but, although we offered, for several days running, a couple of piastres for a single spadix of the hermaphrodite blossoms to every negro boy we met in the streets of Regia and Guanavacoa, it was in vain, for, in the tropics, no free man will ever undertake any labour attended by fatigue unless he is compelled to do so by imperative necessity! The botanists and painters of the Royal Spanish Commission of Natural History under Count Don Jaruco y Mopox (Estevez, Boldo, Guio, Echeveria), confessed to us that, for several years, they had been unable to examine these blossoms, owing to the absolute impossibility of obtaining them. “After this statement of the difficulties attending their acquisition, the fact of our being only able, in the course of two years, systematically to describe twelve species of palms, although we had discovered twenty species, may be understood; but I confess it would hardly have been credible to me before I left Europe. How interesting a work might be written on palms by a traveller, who could exclusively devote himself to the delineation, in their natural size, of the spathe, spadix, inflorescence and fruits!” (Thus I wrote many years before the Brazilian travels of Martius and Spix, and the appearance of the admirable work on Palms by the former.)