ca; to the valleys of the Orinoco and Amazon; to
Trinidad, as a fragment of the old Orinocquan land, and possibly to
some of the southern Antilles. So now, as we are in their home, it
may be worth our while to pause a little round these strange and
noble forms.

Botanists tell us that they are, or rather may have been in old
times, akin to myrtles. If so, they have taken a grand and original
line of their own, and persevered in it for ages, till they have
specialised themselves to a condition far in advance of most
myrtles, in size, beauty, and use. They may be known from all other
trees by one mark--their large handsome flowers. A group of the
innumerable stamens have grown together on one side of the flower
into a hood, which bends over the stigma and the other stamens.
Tall trees they are, and glorious to behold, when in full flower;
but they are notorious mostly for their huge fruits and delicious
nuts. One of their finest forms, and the only one which the
traveller is likely to see often in Trinidad, is the Cannon-ball
tree. {227} There is a grand specimen in the Botanic Garden; and
several may be met with in any day's ride through the high woods,
and distinguished at once from any other tree. The stem rises,
without a fork, for sixty feet or more, and rolls out at the top
into a head very like that of an elm trimmed up, and like an elm too
in its lateral water-boughs. For the whole of the stem, from the
very ground to the forks, and the larger fork-branches likewise, are
feathered all over with numberless short prickly pendent branchlets,
which roll outward, and then down, and then up again in graceful
curves, and carry large pale crimson flowers, each with a pink hood
in the middle, looking like a new-born baby's fist. Those flowers,
when torn, turn blue on exposure to the light; and when they fall,
leave behind them the cannon-ball, a rough brown globe, as big as a
thirty two pound shot, which you must get down with a certain
caution, lest that befall you which befell a certain gallant officer
on the mainland of America. For, fired with a post-prandial
ambition to obtain a cannon ball, he took to himself a long bamboo,
and poked at the tree. He succeeded: but not altogether as he had
hoped. For the cannon ball, in coming down, avenged itself by
dropping exactly on the bridge of his nose, felling him to the
ground, and giving him such a pair of black eyes that he