slender, spiny palms, with plum-like fruit, prickly acacias, and
thorny bromelias. This spiny character of vegetation seems to be
characteristic of dry rocky places and tracts of country liable to
great drought. Probably it is as a protection from herbivorous
animals, to prevent them browsing upon the twigs and small branches
where herbaceous vegetation is dried up. Small armadillos abound
near these rocky knolls, and are said to feed on ants and other
insects. We had a long chase after one, which we observed some
distance from the rock, over the cracked and dried-up plain: though
it could not run very fast, it doubled quickly, and the rough
cracked ground made odds in its favour; but it was ultimately
secured. Pigeons, brown coloured, of various sizes, from that of a
thrush to that of a common dove, were numerous and very tame. One
of the smallest species alights and seeks about in the streets of
small towns for seeds, like a sparrow, and more boldly than that
bird, for it is not molested by the children--more perhaps from
indolence than from any lack of the element of cruelty in their
dispositions. After crossing the plains we rode over undulating
hills, here called savannahs, with patches of forest on the rising
ground, and small plains on which grows the ternate-leaved jicara
(pronounced hickory), a tree about as large as an apple-tree, with
fruit of the size, shape, and appearance of a large green orange,
but growing on the trunk and branches, not amongst the leaves. The
outside of the fruit is a hard thin shell, packed full of seeds in
a kind of dry pulp, on which are fed fowls, and even horses and
cattle in the dry season; the latter are said sometimes to choke
themselves with the fruit, whilst trying to eat it. Of the bruised
seeds is also made a cooling drink, much used in Nicaragua. The
jicara trees grow apart at equal distances, as if planted by man.
The hard thin shell of the fruit, carved in various patterns on the