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The Toradjas of Central Celebes think that the plant Dracaena terminalis has a strong soul, because when it is lopped, it soon grows up again. Hence when a man is ill, his friends will sometimes beat him on the crown of the head with Dracaena leaves in order to strengthen his weak soul with the strong soul of the plant.
It has been found impossible to introduce it into cultivation. Among other flowers were some very large sweet-scented Crinum lilies and some very pretty pink flowering begonias, with their leaves beautifully mottled with silver. Here and there we would notice a variegated croton or pink-leafed dracaena, but these were uncommon.
Some Kenyahs tie the red leaves of the DRACAENA below the prow of their boat whenever they go far from home, believing that this protects them from all danger of attack by crocodiles. The Dog In all Kenyah houses are large numbers of dogs, which vary a good deal in size and colour, but roughly resemble large, mongrel-bred, smooth-haired terriers.
But in New Zealand it is superseded by the form of the yucca; for the Dracaena borealis of Aiton is a Convallaria, of which it has all the appearance. The astringent juice, known in commerce by the name of dragon's blood, is, according to the inquiries we made on the spot, the produce of several American plants, which do not belong to the same genus and of which some are lianas.
M. de Borda, whose death we deplored, was its inmate during his last visit to the Canary Islands. It was in a neighbouring plain that he measured the base, by which he determined the height of the Peak. In this geometrical operation the great dracaena of Orotava served as a mark.
And what is this which hangs over into the road, some fifteen feet in height long, bare, curving sticks, carrying each at its end a flat blaze of scarlet? What but the Poinsettia, paltry scions of which, like the Dracaena, adorn our hothouses and dinner-tables.
We slid down the edge of the hill to the burn, where the massive boulders and shattered rocks were camouflaged by the painting of moss and lichen, the ginger, turmeric, caladium, and dracaena, and by the overhanging palms covered with the rich bird's-nest ferns.
It was not the trees and lianas only that were beautiful in these sunny openings, but the ferns, mosses, orchids, and selaginellas, with the crimson-tipped dracaena, and the crimson-veined caladium, and the great red nepenthe with purple blotches on its nearly diaphanous pitchers, and another pitcher-plant of an epiphytal habit, with pea-green pitchers scrambling to a great height over the branches of the smaller trees.
After the leaves, palm-leaf baskets of the dracaena root are flung to them, more leaves, and then bystanders and every one join in shovelling earth over all till the pit is gone, and a smoking mound of fresh earth takes its place. This will keep hot for four days, and then the masawe will be cooked.
The yucca, dracaena, and palm, entirely shed their scales when they are dried up, and there only remain circles, or rings, arranged round the trunk in different directions. The flabelliform palms preserve their scales at the inferior extremity of the trunk only, but lose them as they increase in age; and the stem is entirely bare, from the middle to the superior extremity.
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