ssentially different forms:--the tall ones, with a
slender and erect stem, terminating with a crown of long feathery
leaves, or with broad fan-shaped leaves," remarks Professor Agassiz;
"the bushy ones, the leaves of which rise, as it were, in tufts from the
ground, the stem remaining hidden under the foliage; the brush-like
ones, with a small stem, and a few rather large leaves; and the winding,
creeping, slender species. Their flowers and fronds are as varied as
their stalks. Some of these fruits may be compared to large woody nuts
with a fleshy mass inside, others have a scaly covering, others resemble
peaches or apricots, while others, still, are like plums or grapes.
Most of them are eatable, and rather pleasant to the taste."

Among the most beautiful is the mauritia, or miriti, with pendent
clusters of reddish fruit; its enormous, spreading, fan-like leaves cut
into ribbons. Contrasted with it appears the manicaria, or the bussu,
with stiff entire leaves, some thirty feet in length, almost upright,
and very close in their mode of growth, and serrated all along their
edges. The leaves all sprout from, a comparatively short stem.

More curious is the raphia, with plume-like leaves, sometimes from forty
to fifty feet in length, starting also from a short stem--almost from
the ground. Its vase-like form is peculiarly graceful and symmetrical.

Among the most curious is the pashiuba barrigudo, or bulging-stemmed
palm (Iriartea ventricosa); which, rising on a pyramid of roots for
several feet, runs up in a single column for some distance, and then
swells in a curious spindle-form, again to assume the same proportions
as below, till its head spreads out in several fan-like branches with
web-shaped leaflets. The tree looks as if supported on stilts, and a
person can stand upright among the roots of old trees with the
perpendicular stem above his head. These roots have the form of
straight rods, and are studded with stout thorns, whilst the trunk is
quite smooth. The purpose of this curious arrangement is probably to
recompense the tree by root-growth above the soil for its inability, in
consequence of the competition of neighbouring roots, to extend itself
underground.

Here, too, grows the slender and graceful assai-palm, with its perfectly
smooth trunk,--the fruit appearing in a heavy cluster of berries just
below the cluster of leaves on its summit. The stem is hard and tough
as horn, and is much made use