Note 7 — Chapter II · TRINIDAD AND THE ORINOCO

Further on we have the comely bread-fruit tree, with its deeply-lobed leaves and its massive fruit, the many-rooted and many-branched mangrove,7 and not far distant is a clump of royal palms, with their smooth pearl-gray columns and coronals of verdure. Or there is a group of kindred growth—jagua palms—whose crown of pinnated leaves, each full twenty-five feet long, caused Humboldt to declare that on this truly magnificent tree “Nature had lavished every beauty of form.” While standing by one of the pillar-stems of the jagua palm, beneath its emerald ostrich plumes, we were quite prepared to share Kingsley’s enthusiasm for palm trees in general. “Like a Greek statue in a luxurious drawing-room,” he writes, “sharp-cut, cold, virginal; shaming by the grandeur of mere form the voluptuousness of mere color, however rich and harmonious; so stands the palm of the forest; to be worshipped rather than to be loved.”8