Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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The
Fruits Of This Tree Are Very Extraordinary; Every Cluster Contains
From Fifty To Eighty; They Are Yellow Like Apples, Grow Purple In
Proportion As They Ripen, Two Or Three Inches Thick, And Generally,
From Abortion, Without A Kernel.
Among the eighty or ninety species of
palm-trees peculiar to the New Continent, which I have enumerated in
the Nova Genera Plantarum Aequinoctialum, there are none in which the
sarcocarp is developed in a manner so extraordinary.
The fruit of the
pirijao furnishes a farinaceous substance, as yellow as the yolk of an
egg, slightly saccharine, and extremely nutritious. It is eaten like
plantains or potatoes, boiled or roasted in the ashes, and affords a
wholesome and agreeable aliment. The Indians and the missionaries are
unwearied in their praises of this noble palm-tree, which might be
called the peach-palm. We found it cultivated in abundance at San
Fernando, San Balthasar, Santa Barbara, and wherever we advanced
towards the south or the east along the banks of the Atabapo and the
Upper Orinoco. In those wild regions we are involuntarily reminded of
the assertion of Linnaeus, that the country of palm-trees was the
first abode of our species, and that man is essentially palmivorous.*
(* Homo HABITAT intra tropicos, vescitur palmis, lotophagus;
HOSPITATUR extra tropicos sub novercante Cerere, carnivorus. Man
DWELLS NATURALLY within the tropics, and lives on the fruits of the
palm-tree; he EXISTS in other parts of the world, and there makes
shift to feed on corn and flesh.
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