The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1856-02-19 00:00:00

APPLICATIONS OP THE PALM.

Take a walk in the streets of tondon, and observe every-
where how substances originally obtained from palms, and
turned to useful purposes, meet your eyes. That ragged boy,
sweeping the crossing, and begging you with a faltering voice,
real or assumed, to " remember poor Jack," holds in his
hand a broom, the fibrous substance of which was cut by the
wild Indians of Brazil from the stems of a palm ; that gentle-
man, dressed in the tip-top of fashion, who playfully swings
his " Penang lawyer," little thinks that, in carrying that
walking cane, he is in fact carrying a young plant of the
Licuala aeutifida; that fin?, lady's parasol knob—what is it
but a coquilla-nut turned into that shape ? Continue your
walk, and you will find still more worthy of notice in a
Popular History of the Palms Those " chip hats" so ex-
tensively worn on fine summer days, what are they made of ?
—the leaves of a Cuban palm (Thrinax argentea). Look at
that stand, with heaps of dates upon it, gathered on the
borders of the great Desert of Sahara, and eagerly purchased
by the people; look at those fine cocoa-nuts, grown on the
shores of the Indian Ocean and the Carribean Sea, and here
retailed in penny slices to the humbler inhabitants of the
British metropolis. Step into a house, and there too you will
observe many products obtained from palms in the most
remote corners of the globe. That thick brownish matting,
now so generally used for covering halls, staircases, and
offices, is woven from the husk (mesocarpium) surrounding
the cocoa-nut. These beautiful pieces of furniture which
arrest your attention are made of various kinds of palm-wood.
That elegant little plaything you see in the hands of yonder
child was skilfully manufactured of the bone-like kernels
(albumen) of the vegetable-ivory palm. Those fine stearic
candles illumining the room—what are they composed of but
the fatty substance extracted from the fruit of the oil-palm
and the cocoa-nut ? That sago which,under various disguises,
appears at the dinner-table, it is also the produce, the pith, of
palms flourishing in the islands of the East Indian Archi-
pelago. That arrack, pronounced by connoisseurs to be of
excellent quality, it too is extracted from a palm—the cocoa-
nut. Be still more inquisitive, and ask of what that tooth-
powder, so extensively applied, consists, and you will be told
that its chief ingredients are betel-nuts, previously reduced to
charcoal, and dragon's blood—both produced by palms ; or
examine our toilet-soap, and you will find that the fatty sub-
stance which enters so largely into the composition of it has
been derived from palms.

In the eyes of Dr. Seeman the palm has many
virtues, and with many well-considered arguments he
inculcates the benefits to be derived from its cultiva-
tion. As was to be expected in such a work, the value
of palm-oil is treated of at considerable length, and its
importance as an article of manufacturing and com-
mercial interest receives much attention. Besides
being an intelligent naturalist, and having an eye to
commercial enterprise, the doctor is also a philanthro-
pist, and thus views the culture of the palm as an