Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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The Duration Of The Tree Does Not In General Exceed Eighty
Or A Hundred Years; And Its Mean Height At That Age Is From Seventy
To Eighty Feet.
This rapid growth is so much the more remarkable,
as other palm-trees, for instance, the moriche,* (* Mauritia
flexuosa.
) And the palm of Sombrero,* (* Corypha tectorum.) the
longevity of which is very great, frequently do not attain a
greater height than fourteen or eighteen feet in the space of sixty
years. In the first thirty or forty years, a cocoa-tree of the gulf
of Cariaco bears every lunation a cluster of ten or fourteen nuts,
all of which, however, do not ripen. It may be reckoned that, on an
average, a tree produces annually a hundred nuts, which yield eight
flascos* of oil. (One flasco contains 70 or 80 cubic inches, Paris
measure.) In Provence, an olive-tree thirty years old yields twenty
pounds, or seven flascos of oil, so that it produces something less
than a cocoa-tree. There are in the gulf of Cariaco plantations
(haciendas) of eight or nine thousand cocoa-trees. They resemble,
in their picturesque appearance, those fine plantations of
date-trees near Elche, in Murcia, where, over the superficies of
one square league, there may be found upwards of 70,000 palms. The
cocoa-tree bears fruit in abundance till it is thirty or forty
years old; after that age the produce diminishes, and a trunk a
hundred years old, without being altogether barren, yields very
little.
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