Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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It Has Palmate Leaves,
And Has No Relation To The Palm-Trees With Pinnate And Curled Leaves;
To The Jagua, Which Appears To Be A Species Of The Cocoa-Tree; Or To
The Vadgiai Or Cucurito, Which May Be Assimilated To The Fine Species
Oreodoxa.
The cucurito, which is the palm most prevalent around the
cataracts of the Atures and Maypures, is remarkable for its
stateliness.
Its leaves, or rather its palms, crown a trunk of eighty
or one hundred feet high; their direction is almost perpendicular when
young, as well as at their full growth, the points only being
incurvated. They look like plumes of the most soft and verdant green.
The cucurito, the pirijao, the fruit of which resembles the apricot,
the Oreodoxa regia or palma real of the island of Cuba, and the
ceroxylon of the high Andes, are the most majestic of all the
palm-trees we saw in the New World. As we advance toward the temperate
zone, the plants of this family decrease in size and beauty. What a
difference between the species we have just mentioned, and the
date-tree of the East, which unfortunately has become to the landscape
painters of Europe the type of a group of palm-trees!
It is not suprising that persons who have travelled only in the north
of Africa, in Sicily, or in Spain, cannot conceive that, of all large
trees, the palm is the most grand and beautiful in form. Incomplete
analogies prevent Europeans from having a just idea of the aspect of
the torrid zone.
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