Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
- Page 531 of 777 - First - Home
Several
Species Of Palms* Furnish The Inhabitants Of Equinoctial America And
Africa With The Oil Which We Derive From The Olive.
(* In Africa, the
elais or maba; in America the cocoa-tree.
In the cocoa-tree it is the
perisperm; and in the elais (as in the olive, and the oleineae in
general) it is the sarcocarp, or the pulp of the pericarp, that yields
oil. This difference, observed in the same family, appears to me very
remarkable, though it is in no way contradictory to the results
obtained by De Candolle in his ingenious researches on the chemical
properties of plants. If our Alfonsia oleifera belong to the genus
Elais (as Brown, with great reason believes), it follows, that in the
same genus the oil is found in the sarcocarp and in the perisperm.)
What the coniferae are to the temperate zone, the terebinthaceae and
the guttiferae are to the torrid. In the forests of those burning
climates, (where there is neither pine, thuya, taxodium, nor even a
podocarpus,) resins, balsams, and aromatic gums, are furnished by the
maronobea, the icica, and the amyris. The collecting of these gummy
and resinous substances is a trade in the village of Javita. The most
celebrated resin bears the name of mani; and of this we saw masses of
several hundred-weight, resembling colophony and mastic. The tree
called mani by the Paraginis, which M. Bonpland believes to be the
Moronobaea coccinea, furnishes but a small quantity of the substance
employed in the trade with Angostura.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 531 of 777
Words from 144174 to 144427
of 211397
