jungle trees, vivid enough to our imagination, but many of which have
never before been seen in this country.

Boys who feel pirate blood in their veins will revel in this
reproduction of the scenes of imagined adventure. Any reasonable pirate
could be quite happy here. For here is the breadfruit tree, read of in
many a tale of castaways; also the cocoanut palm, with the fruits
hanging among the fronds, waiting for the legendary monkey to scamper up
the trunk and hurl the great balls at the heads of the beholders. Here,
too, are the mango, and many sorts of bananas, and the cabbage palm,
another favorite resource of starving adventurers. With these there are
other jungle denizens,--the bamboo palm, the paperleaf palm, splendid
specimens of the world-old cycad family, the guanabana, and a Tom Thumb
palm, which, full grown, is no more than a handbreadth high.

Ancient among trees are the two specimens of microcycas from the swamps
of Cuba. These Methuselahs of the forest are at least 1,000 years old,
according to the botanists. They are among the slowest growing of living
things, and neither of them is much taller than a man. They were
seedlings when Alfred the Great ruled England, and perhaps four feet
high when Columbus first broke through the western seas. In the four
centuries of Cuban history they have not grown so much again.

These venerable trees belong to the bluest-blooded aristocracy of the
vegetable world. Ages ago they inhabited our northern states. Their
family has come down practically unchanged from the steaming days of the
Carboniferous period, when ferns grew one hundred feet high, and
thronged with other rank tropical growths in matted masses to form the
coal measures. The fossil remains of cycads in the rocks of that period
prove that they once flourished in the tropic swamps where now are the