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Updated: May 6, 2025
These were perhaps the names of some tribes, into which the great Guaraonese nation was divided. The flour bears the name of yuruma: I have eaten it at the town of St. By interrupting the blossoming, nature is obliged to carry elsewhere the saccharine or amylaceous matter, which would accumulate in the flowers of the maguey and in the fruit of the Mauritia.
In comparing the herbaceous and nourishing fibres of the young undeveloped leaves of the palm-trees with the sago of the Mauritia, of which the Indians make bread similar to that of the root of the Jatropha manihot, we involuntarily recollect the striking analogy which modern chemistry has proved to exist between ligneous matter and the amylaceous fecula.
Plants that love humidity adorn the scenery surrounding the cataracts. We there find in the plains groups of heliconias and other scitamineae with large and glossy leaves, bamboos, and the three palm-trees, the murichi, jagua, and vadgiai, each of which forms a separate group. The murichi, or mauritia with scaly fruits, is the celebrated sago-tree of the Guaraon Indians.
It, and the little strip of flat ground behind it, hold a three- roomed cottage of course on stilts; a shed which serves as a kitchen; a third ruined building, which is tenanted mostly by lizards and creeping flowers; some twenty or thirty coconut trees; and on the very edge of the sea an almond-tree, its roots built up to seaward with great stones, its trunk hung with fishing lines; and around it, scattered on the shingle, strange shells, bits of coral, coconuts and their fragments; almonds from the tree; the round scaly fruit of the Mauritia palm, which has probably floated across the gulf from the forests of the Orinoco or the Caroni; and the long seeds of the mangrove, in shape like a roach-fisher's float, and already germinating, their leaves showing at the upper end, a tiny root at the lower.
The Mauritia aculeata is called by the Indians juria or cauvaja; its leaves are in the form of a fan, and they bend towards the ground. At the centre of every leaf, no doubt from the effect of some disease of the parenchyma, concentric circles of alternate blue and yellow appear, the yellow prevailing towards the middle.
These phenomena are observed on barren tracts of fifty or sixty leagues in length, wherever the savannahs are not traversed by rivers; for on the borders of rivulets, and around little pools of stagnant water, the traveller finds at certain distances, even during the period of the great droughts, thickets of mauritia, a palm, the leaves of which spread out like a fan, and preserve a brilliant verdure.
The country exhibits the uniform aspect of forests covering ground perfectly flat. The fine pirijao palm, with its fruit like peaches, and a new species of bache, or mauritia, its trunk bristled with thorns, rise amid smaller trees, the vegetation of which appears to be retarded by the continuance of the inundations.
On one side a fine pavilion was erected, the upright posts consisting of real fan-leaved palm trees the Mauritia flexuosa, which had been brought from the forest, stems and heads entire, and fixed in the ground. The booth was illuminated with coloured lamps, and lined with red and white cloth.
The land lay below the upper level of the daily tides, so that there was no underwood, and the ground was bare. The trees were almost all of one species of Palm, the gigantic fan-leaved Mauritia flexuosa; only on the borders was there a small number of a second kind, the equally remarkable Ubussu palm, Manicaria saccifera.
From the former they make the intoxicating paiwari the cause of many savage murders among them. They depend greatly on the pith of the mauritia, or ita, as it serves them for bread; while of other parts of the tree they construct their dwellings. The younger people possess good features some of them wearing thin pieces of silver suspended from the cartilage of the nostrils.
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