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 Would Be Interesting To
Examine, Besides The Milk Of The Lactescent Fungi, Those Species
Which, When Cut In Pieces, Change Their Colour On The Contact Of
Atmospheric Air.
Though we have referred the palo de vaca to the family of the sapotas,
we have nevertheless found in
It a great resemblance to some plants of
the urticeous kind, especially to the fig-tree, because of its
terminal stipulae in the shape of a horn; and to the brosimum, on
account of the structure of its fruit. M. Kunth would even have
preferred this last classification; if the description of the fruit,
made on the spot, and the nature of the milk, which is acrid in the
urticeae, and sweet in the sapotas, did not seem to confirm our
conjecture. Bredemeyer saw, like us, the fruit, and not the flower of
the cow tree. He asserts that he observed [sometimes?] two seeds,
lying one against the other, as in the alligator pear-tree (Laurus
persea). Perhaps this botanist had the intention of expressing the
same conformation of the nucleus that Swartz indicates in the
description of the brosimum - "nucleus bilobus aut bipartibilis." We
have mentioned the places where this remarkable tree grows: it will be
easy for botanical travellers to procure the flower of the palo de
vaca and to remove the doubts which still remain, of the family to
which it belongs.)
Whilst the palo de vaca manifests the immense fecundity and the bounty
of nature in the torrid zone, it also reminds us of the numerous
causes which favour in those fine climates the careless indolence of
man.
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