For Example, There Is A Specimen Of The Pandanus Odoratissimus In The Palm-House In The Edinburgh Botanic Gardens, Which

Is certainly a malignant caricature, with its long straggling branches, and widely scattered tufts of poverty stricken foliage. The bananas

And plantains in that same palm-house represent only the feeblest and poorest of their tribe. They require not only warmth and moisture, but the generous sunshine of the tropics for their development. In the same house the date and sugar-palms are tolerable specimens, but the cocoa-nut trees are most truly "palms in exile."

I suppose that few people ever forget the first sight of a palm-tree of any species. I vividly remember seeing one for the first time at Malaga, but the coco-palm groves of the Pacific have a strangeness and witchery of their own. As I write now I hear the moaning rustle of the wind through their plume-like tops, and their long slender stems, and crisp crown of leaves above the trees with shining leafage which revel in damp, have a suggestion of Orientalism about them. How do they come too, on every atoll or rock that raises its head throughout this lonely ocean? They fringe the shores of these islands. Wherever it is dry and fiercely hot, and the lava is black and hard, and nothing else grows, or can grow, there they are, close to the sea, sending their root-fibres seawards as if in search of salt water. Their long, curved, wrinkled, perfectly cylindrical stems, bulging near the ground like an apothecary's pestle, rise to a height of from sixty to one hundred feet.

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