“The form and colour of the fruit also present more variety than is generally supposed to be the case in Europe. _Mauritia flexuosa_ has egg-shaped fruits, whose smooth, brown, and scaly surface gives them the appearance of young pine cones. How great is the difference between the large triangular cocoa-nut, the berry of the date, and the small stone-fruit of the Corozo! But of all the fruits of the palm, none can be compared for beauty with those of the Pirijao (_Pihiguao_) of San Fernando de Atabapo and of San Balthasar. They are oval, and of a golden colour (one-half being of a purplish red); are mealy, without seed, two or three inches in thickness, and hang in clusters like grapes from the summits of their majestic palm-trunks.” I have already spoken in the earlier part of this work of these beautiful fruits, of which there are seventy or eighty clustered together in one bunch, and which can be prepared in a variety of ways like bananas and potatoes. The spathe enclosing the blossom bursts suddenly open in some species of palms, with an audible report. Richard Schomburgk has like myself observed this phenomenon[OB] in the flowering of the Oreodoxa oleracea. This first opening of the blossoms of the palm accompanied with noise, reminds us of Pindar’s Dithyrambus on Spring, and of the moment when in the Argive Nemæa, “the first opening shoot of the date-palm announces the coming of balmy spring.”[OC] Palms, bananas, and arborescent ferns constitute three forms of especial beauty peculiar to every portion of the tropical zone; wherever heat and moisture co-operate, vegetation is most exuberant and vegetable forms present the greatest diversity. Hence South America is the most beautiful portion of the palm world. In Asia the palm form is rare, in consequence perhaps of a considerable part of the Indian continent beneath the equator having been destroyed and covered by the ocean in some earlier revolution of our planet. We know scarcely anything of the African palms between the Bay of Benin and the coast of Ajan; and we are, generally speaking, as already observed, acquainted with only a very small number of African palm-forms.