Palm trees of the Amazon and their uses

This beautiful species has the stem hardly so thick as the little finger, and nine or ten feet high, smooth and distinctly jointed. The leaves are four or five in number, terminal, entire, three or four times as long as they are wide, and not very deeply bifid at the end. The petioles and their sheathing bases are thickly set with long, flat, black spines.

The spadices are very small, erect and two-branched, growing from among the persistent sheathing bases below the leaves. The spathes are small, erect and persistent, clothed with adpressed brown spines. The fruit is small and globular, and of a black colour.

This palm was found at S. Carlos on the Upper Rio Negro and on the “Estrada de Javita,” a road through the forest for ten miles, which connects the river-systems of the Rio Negro and Orinoco, and along which most of the traffic between Venezuela and Brazil passes. In both cases it grew in the shady virgin forest.

Male and female flowers mixed in the same spadix, bracteate. Spathe double; exterior bifid; interior complete, woody. Male flowers with six stamens and a rudimentary pistil. Female flowers with three sessile stigmas, but with no rudiments of stamens.

The stems are lofty, rather slender, and armed with dense black cylindrical spines disposed in regular rings. The leaves are terminal and pinnate, but in the young plants entire, and the petioles are very spiny. The spadices are simply branched, growing from beneath the leaves, and the fruits are large, ovate, fleshy or mealy and eatable.

Three species only of this genus are known, inhabiting the lower mountain ranges of Peru and New Granada. They are lofty and conspicuous Palms with a remarkably handsome crown of foliage. One species only is found in the Amazon district, in all parts of which it is commonly cultivated.