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Any one who has hammered at a Bertholletia fruit will be ready to believe the story that the Indians, fond as they are of the nuts, avoid the 'totocke' trees till the fruit has all fallen, for fear of fractured skulls; and the older story which Humboldt gives out of old Laet, that the Indians dared not enter the forests, when the trees were fruiting, without having their heads and shoulders covered with bucklers of hard wood.
They belong to Bertholletia excelsa, a tree which grows sparingly I have never seen it wild in the southern part of the island, but plentifully in the forests of Guiana, and which is said to be one of the tallest of all the forest giants.
The branches of the bertholletia are open, very long, almost entirely bare towards the base, and loaded at their summits with tufts of very close foliage. This disposition of the semicoriaceous leaves, which are a little silvery on their under part, and more than two feet long, makes the branches bend down toward the ground, like the fronds of the palm-tree.
To Humboldt himself, I believe, is due the re-discovery of the tree itself and its enormous fruit; and the name of Bertholletia excelsa was given by him. The tree, he says, 'is not more than two or three feet in diameter, but attains one hundred or one hundred and twenty feet in height.
They had no doubt been carried, as a very rare fruit, to the Upper Maranon, and thence, by the Cordilleras, to Quito and Peru. The Novus Orbis of Laet, in which I found the first account of the cow-tree, furnishes also a description and a figure singularly exact of the fruit of the bertholletia.
The pericarp of the bertholletia has traces of four cells, and I have sometimes found even five. The seeds have two very distinct coverings, and this circumstance renders the structure of the fruit more complicated than in the lecythis, the pekea or caryocar, and the saouvari.
Perhaps this tree denoted the existence of a forest of bertholletia in the inland country on the east and north-east. We know, at least, with certainty, that this fine tree grows wild in the third degree of latitude, in the Cerro de Guanaya. They are somewhat like colonists that have advanced in the midst of a country peopled with different vegetable productions.
The fruit, also, is largely consumed; while the wood is excessively durable in water. Two lofty trees, closely allied to each other the Lecythis ollaria and the Bertholletia excelsa produce enormous capsules full of nuts. The first, called the sapucaya, yields these curious capsules known as cuyas de maccao, or monkeys' drinking-cups.
The cipo passed from one tree to another without breaking its continuity, sometimes twisting round the trunks, sometimes garlanding the branches, here jumping form a dragon-tree to a rosewood, then from a gigantic chestnut, the "Bertholletia excelsa," to some of the wine palms, "baccabas," whose branches have been appropriately compared by Agassiz to long sticks of coral flecked with green.
Within the tropics, the bertholletia forms in less than fifty or sixty days a pericarp, the ligneous part of which is half an inch thick, and which it is difficult to saw with the sharpest instruments. A great naturalist has observed, that the wood of fruits attains in general a hardness which is scarcely to be found in the wood of the trunks of trees.
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