BABER.

153

were too tempting a prize to be abandoned. The king
was a profound admirer of Nature, and India presented
objects to diet his admiration. Her palm trees alone
are a volume for the study of those who love to ex-
amine the wonders of the vegetable world. The most
useful of these palms, and not the least extraordinary,
is the palmyra.* Its manner of growth is similar to
that of the cocoa-nut tree. The stem attains nearly the
same height, but is more uniformly perpendicular, and
the texture of the timber much firmer and more dur-
able. The blacker this is, the more valuable ; and it
has the rare quality of resisting the depredations of in-
sects. The leaves are shorter, harder, and thicker than
those of the tree just mentioned, having the form
of an open fan, as which they are frequently used,
and from this circumstance the palmyra is common-
ly called the fan-leaf palm. Upon slips of these leaves
all Cingalese and Burmese manuscripts are written
with an iron stylus. The fruit of this palm is a firm
pulp, about the bigness of a new-born child's head, of
a black colour, emitting an agreeable perfume, and con-
taining in its centre from one to three nuts the size of
a common plum. The toddy drawn from the pal-
myra makes better arrack than that extracted from
any other palm; and excellent sugar is obtained by
mixing the toddy with the pulp of the fruit and
boiling them together. This tree, besides supplying a
valuable wood for exportation, is of the greatest im-
portance to the natives; its fruit and roots being used
by them for food, and many other parts being success-
fully applied to the purposes of manufacture. The

* See Vignette.

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