was not
seen on parade for a fortnight.

The pulp of this cannon-ball is, they say, 'vinous and pleasant'
when fresh; but those who are mindful of what befell our forefather
Adam from eating strange fruits, will avoid it, as they will many
more fruits eaten in the Tropics, but digestible only by the dura
ilia of Indians and Negroes. Whatever virtue it may have when
fresh, it begins, as soon as stale, to give out an odour too
abominable to be even recollected with comfort.

More useful, and the fruit of an even grander tree, are those
'Brazil nuts' which are sold in every sweet-shop at home. They
belong to Bertholletia excelsa, a tree which grows sparingly--I have
never seen it wild--in the southern part of the island, but
plentifully in the forests of Guiana, and which is said to be one of
the tallest of all the forest giants. The fruit, round like the
cannon-ball, and about the size of a twenty-four pounder, is harder
than the hardest wood, and has to be battered to pieces with the
back of a hatchet to disclose the nuts, which lie packed close
inside. Any one who has hammered at a Bertholletia fruit will be
ready to believe the story that the Indians, fond as they are of the
nuts, avoid the 'totocke' trees till the fruit has all fallen, for
fear of fractured skulls; and the older story which Humboldt gives
out of old Laet, {228} that the Indians dared not enter the forests,
when the trees were fruiting, without having their heads and
shoulders covered with bucklers of hard wood. These 'Almendras de
Peru' (Peru almonds), as they were called, were known in Europe as
early as the sixteenth century, the seeds being carried up the
Maragnon, and by the Cordilleras to Peru, men knew not from whence.
To Humboldt himself, I believe, is due the re-discovery of the tree
itself and its enormous fruit; and the name of Bertholletia excelsa
was given by him. The tree, he says, 'is not more than two or three
feet in diameter, but attains one hundred or one hundred and twenty
feet in height. It does not resemble the Mammee, the star-apple,
and several other trees of the Tropics, of which the branches, as in
the laurels of the temperate zone, rise straight toward the sky.
The branches of the Bertholletia are open, very long, almost
entirely bare toward the base, and loaded at their summits with
tufts of very close foliage. This disposition of the semi-
coriaceous leaves, a little silvery