Palm trees of the Amazon and their uses

The Jauarí has the stem rather slenderer than the Tucumá, but of about equal height, and armed with regular narrow rings of spines. The leaves are terminal and of moderate size. The leaflets are long, narrow and very much drooping, and the midribs and sheaths are thickly covered with long, flat, black spines.

The spadices are erect, simply branched, and hidden amongst the leaves. The fruit is small, oval, green, and not eatable.

The rather small dense head of foliage, combined with the prickly habit of this palm, render it altogether one of the least pleasing of the family; and the feeling is increased by its abundance in many localities, extending for miles along the river banks to the exclusion of any other species. It is moreover one of the least useful among the larger palms, the only part which is applied to any purpose being the hard, black, oval seeds, of which the Brazilian ladies of the Upper Amazon make heads for their lace-making bobbins.

This species is unknown in the neighbourhood of Pará and on the Lower Amazon. It first occurs near Villa Nova, about five hundred miles up the river, where the tidal rise and fall of the water ceases and the annual floods rise to a considerable height. From this point upwards it is very abundant, growing everywhere on the margins of the rivers, in places which are for six or eight months in the year under water. It is never found beyond the limits of the floods, and in travelling up the Rio Negro it is for hundreds of miles the only species of Astrocaryum met with.