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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It is not loaded with flowers* till in its fifteenth
year, and they appear about the end of March and the beginning of
April.
(* According to accounts somewhat vague, they are yellow, very
large, and have some similitude to those of the Bombax ceiba. M.
Bonpland says, however, in his botanical journal written on the banks
of the Rio Negro, flos violaceus. It was thus the Indians of the river
had described to him the colour of the corolla.) The fruits ripen
towards the end of May, and some trees retain them till the end of
August. These fruits, which are as large as the head of a child, often
twelve or thirteen inches in diameter, make a very loud noise in
falling from the tops of the trees. Nothing is more fitted to fill the
mind with admiration of the force of organic action in the equinoctial
zone than the aspect of those great igneous pericarps, for instance,
the cocoa-tree (lodoicea) of the Maldives among the monocotyledons,
and the bertholletia and the lecythis among the dicotyledons. In our
climates only the cucurbitaceae produce in the space of a few months
fruits of an extraordinary size; but these fruits are pulpy and
succulent. 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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