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The Princes of Vegetation are to be found in all parts of the world where the climate is adapted to the tropical tastes of their Royal Highnesses.

They have come into our art, our literature, and our familiar knowledge from the East; but they abound in the tropics of the West, and some species are now common in South America whose original home was in India.

The cocoa-nut palm (Cocos nucifera) is an Indian and South Sea Islands Prince; but his sway extends now over all tropical countries. The cocoa-nut palm begins to bear fruit in from seven to eight years after planting, and it bears on for no less than seventy to eighty years.

Length of days, you see, as well as beauty and beneficence, mark this royal race which Linnaeus placed alone!

Cocoa-nuts are useful in many ways. The milk is pleasant, and in hot and thirsty countries is no doubt often a great boon. The white flesh–a familiar school-boy dainty–is eaten raw and cooked. It produces oil, and is used in the manufacture of stearine candles. It is also used to make marine soap, which will lather in salt water. The wood of the palm is used for ornamental joinery, the leaves for thatch and basket-work, the fibre for cordage and cocoa-nut matting, and the husk for fuel and brushes.

Cocoa and chocolate come from another palm (Theobroma cacao), which is cultivated largely in South America and the West Indies.

Sago and tapioca are made from the starch yielded by several species of palm. The little round balls of sago are formed from a white powder (sago flour, as it is called), just as homoeopathic pillules are formed from sugar. It is possible to see chemists make pills from boluses to globules, but the Malay Indians are said jealously to keep the process of “pearling” sago a trade secret. Tapioca is only another form of sago starch. Sago flour is now imported into England in considerable quantities. It is used for “dressing” calicoes.

Among those products of the palm which we import most liberally is “vegetable ivory.”

Vegetable ivory is the kernel of the fruit of one of the most beautiful of palms (Phytelephas macrocarpa).

This Prince of Vegetation is a native of South America. “It is short-stemmed and procumbent, but has a magnificent crown of light green ostrich-feather-like leaves, which rise from thirty to forty feet high.” The fruit is as big as a man’s head. Two or three millions of the nuts are imported by us every year, and applied to all the purposes of use and ornament for which real ivory is available.

The Coquilla-nut palm (Attalea funifera), whose fruit is about the size of an ostrich-egg, also supplies a kind of vegetable ivory.

Our ideas of palm-trees are so much derived from the date palm of Judaea, that an erect and stately growth is probably inseparably connected in our minds with the Princes of Vegetation. But some of the most beautiful are short-stemmed and creeping; whilst others fling giant arms from tree to tree of the tropical forests, now drooping to the ground, and then climbing up again in very luxuriance of growth. Many of the rattan palms (Calamus) are of this character. They wind in and out, hanging in festoons from the branches, on which they lean in princely condescension, with stems upwards of a thousand feet in length.

There is something comical in having to add that these clinging rattan stems, which cannot support their own weight, have a proverbial fame, and are in great request for the manufacture of walking-sticks. They are also largely imported into Great Britain for canework.

Another very striking genus (Astrocaryum) is remarkable for being clothed in every part–stem, leaves, and spathe–with sharp spines, which are sometimes twelve inches long. Astrocaryum murumura is edible. The pulp of the fruit is said to be like that of a melon, and it has a musky odour. It is a native of tropical America, and abundant on the Amazon. Cattle wander about the forests in search of it, and pigs fatten on the nut, which they crunch with their teeth, though it is exceedingly hard.