Huge trees like their kinsfolk, they are clothed in bark layers so delicate that the Indians beat them out till they are as thin as satin-paper, and use them as cigarette-wrappers.

They carry great urn-shaped fruits, big enough to serve for drinking-vessels, each kindly provided with a round wooden cover, which becomes loose and lets out the savoury sapucaya nuts inside, to the comfort of all our 'poor relations.' Ah, when will there arise a tropic Landseer to draw for us some of the strange fashions of the strange birds and beasts of these lands ?--to draw, for instance, the cunning, selfish, greedy grin of delight on the face of some burly, hairy, goitred old red Howler, as he lifts off a 'tapa del cacao de monos' (a monkey- cacao cover), and looks defiance out of the corners of his winking eyes at his wives and children, cousins and grandchildren, who sit round jabbering and screeching, and, monkey fashion, twisting their heads upside down, as they put their arms round each other's waists to peer over each other's shoulders at the great bully, who must feed himself first as his fee for having roared to them for an hour at sunrise on a tree-top, while they sat on the lower branches and looked up, trembling and delighted at the sound and fury of the idiot sermon.
What an untried world is here for the artist of every kind, not merely for the animal painter, for the landscape painter, for the student of human form and attitude, if he chose to live awhile among the still untrained Indians of the Main, or among the graceful Coolies of Trinidad and Demerara, but also for the botanical artist, for the man who should study long and carefully the more striking and beautiful of these wonderful leaves and stems, flowers and fruits, and introduce them into ornamentation, architectural or other.
And so I end my little episode about these Lecythids, only adding that the reader must not confound with their nuts the butter-nuts, Caryocar, or Souari, which may be bought, I believe, at Fortnum and Mason's, and which are of all nuts the largest and the most delicious.

They have not been found as yet in Trinidad, though they abound in Guiana.

They are the fruit also of an enormous tree {230}--there is a young one fruiting finely in the Botanic Garden at Port of Spain--of a quite different order; a cousin of the Matapalos and of the Soap-berries.

It carries large threefold leaves on pointed stalks; spikes of flowers with innumerable stamens; and here and there a fruit something like the cannon-ball, though not quite as large.