United States or Lesotho ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Though we have referred the palo de vaca to the family of the sapotas, we have nevertheless found in it a great resemblance to some plants of the urticeous kind, especially to the fig-tree, because of its terminal stipulae in the shape of a horn; and to the brosimum, on account of the structure of its fruit.

M. Kunth would even have preferred this last classification; if the description of the fruit, made on the spot, and the nature of the milk, which is acrid in the urticeae, and sweet in the sapotas, did not seem to confirm our conjecture. Bredemeyer saw, like us, the fruit, and not the flower of the cow tree.

This is a pleasant island, about two miles long, and as much in breadth, low on the north side, but rising by a gentle ascent to the south. The soil is very good, and produces in the low grounds great store of fine fruits, as plantains, mammees, sapotas, sapadillos, avogato pears, star-apples, and others.

We rest by the Kabusi, a sluggish narrow rivulet. It runs into the Chungu, a quarter of a mile off. The Chungu is broad, but choked with trees and aquatic plants: Sapotas, Eschinomenas, Papyrus, &c. The free stream is 18 yards wide, and waist deep. We had to wade about 100 yards, thigh and waist deep, to get to the free stream. On this, the Chungu, Dr.

Mungo Park has made known the butter-tree of Bambarra, which M. De Candolle suspects to be of the family of sapotas, as well as our milk-tree. The plantain, the sago-tree, and the mauritia of the Orinoco, are as much bread-trees as the rema of the South Sea.

"Oh," says the Don, "they eat it in the castors instead of vinegar." Then come sapotas, mamey, Otaheite gooseberries. "Does she like bananas?" he cuts a tree down with his own hand, and sends the bunch of fruit to her volante; "Sugar-cane?" he bestows a huge bundle of sticks for her leisurely rodentation; he fills her pocket with coral beans for her children.