pandanus. 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. These stems are never
straight, and in a grove lean and curve every way, and are
apparently capable of enduring any force of wind or earthquake.
They look as if they had never been young, and they show no signs of
growth, rearing their plumy tufts so far aloft, and casting their