Along the cliff tall Balatas and Palmistes, with here and there an equally tall Cedar, and on the inside bank a green wall of Balisiers, with leaves full fifteen feet long and heads of scarlet flowers, marked the richness of the soil.

Here and there, too, a Cannon-ball tree rose, grand and strange, among the Balatas; and in one place the ground was strewn with large white flowers, whose peculiar shape told us at once of some other Lecythid tree high overhead.

These Lecythids are peculiar to the hottest parts of South America; to the valleys of the Orinoco and Amazon; to Trinidad, as a fragment of the old Orinocquan land, and possibly to some of the southern Antilles.

So now, as we are in their home, it may be worth our while to pause a little round these strange and noble forms.
Botanists tell us that they are, or rather may have been in old times, akin to myrtles.

If so, they have taken a grand and original line of their own, and persevered in it for ages, till they have specialised themselves to a condition far in advance of most myrtles, in size, beauty, and use.