of the palm-trees illumined by large fires. These are
the habitations of the Guaraons (Tivitivas and Waraweties of
Raleigh), which are suspended from the trunks of the trees. These
tribes hang up mats in the air, which they fill with earth, and
kindle on a layer of moist clay the fire necessary for their
household wants. They have owed their liberty and their political
independence for ages to the quaking and swampy soil, which they
pass over in the time of drought, and on which they alone know how
to walk in security to their solitude in the delta of the Oroonoco,
to their abode on the trees, where religious enthusiasm will
probably never lead any American Stylites. . . . The Mauritia palm-
tree, the _tree of life_ of the missionaries, not only affords the
Guaraons a safe dwelling during the risings of the Oroonoco, but its
shelly fruit, its farinaceous pith, its juice, abounding in
saccharine matter, and the fibres of its petioles, furnish them with
food, wine, and thread proper for making cords and weaving hammocks.
These customs of the Indians of the delta of the Oroonoco were found
formerly in the Gulf of Darien (Uraba), and in the greater part of
the inundated lands between the Guerapiche and the mouths of the
Amazon. It is curious to observe in the lowest degree of human
civilisation the existence of a whole tribe depending on one single
species of palm-tree, similar to those insects which feed on one and
the same flower, or on one and the same part of a plant.' {160}

In a hundred yards more we were on dry ground, and the vegetation
changed at once. The Mauritias stopped short at the edge of the
swamp; and around us towered the smooth stems of giant Mombins,
which the English West Indians call hog-plums, according to the
unfortunate habit of the early settlers of discarding the sonorous
and graceful Indian and Spanish names of plants, and replacing them
by names English, or corruptions of the original, always ugly, and
often silly and vulgar. So the English call yon noble tree a hog-
plum; the botanist (who must, of course, use his world-wide Latin
designation), Spondias lutea; I shall, with the reader's leave, call
it a Mombin, by which name it is, happily, known here, as it was in
the French West Indies in the days of good Pere Labat. Under the
Mombins the undergrowth is, for the most part, huge fans of Cocorite
palm, thirty or forty feet high, their short rugged trunk