The pulp of this cannon-ball is, they say, ‘vinous and pleasant’ when fresh; but those who are mindful of what befell our forefather Adam from eating strange fruits, will avoid it, as they will many more fruits eaten in the Tropics, but digestible only by the dura ilia of Indians and Negroes.  Whatever virtue it may have when fresh, it begins, as soon as stale, to give out an odour too abominable to be even recollected with comfort.

More useful, and the fruit of an even grander tree, are those ‘Brazil nuts’ which are sold in every sweet-shop at home.  They belong to Bertholletia excelsa, a tree which grows sparingly—­I have never seen it wild—­in the southern part of the island, but plentifully in the forests of Guiana, and which is said to be one of the tallest of all the forest giants.  The fruit, round like the cannon-ball, and about the size of a twenty-four pounder, is harder than the hardest wood, and has to be battered to pieces with the back of a hatchet to disclose the nuts, which lie packed close inside.  Any one who has hammered at a Bertholletia fruit will be ready to believe the story that the Indians, fond as they are of the nuts, avoid the ‘totocke’ trees till the fruit has all fallen, for fear of fractured skulls; and the older story which Humboldt gives out of old Laet, {228} that the Indians dared not enter the forests, when the trees were fruiting, without having their heads and shoulders covered with bucklers of hard wood.  These ’Almendras de Peru’ (Peru almonds), as they were called, were known in Europe as early as the sixteenth century, the seeds being carried up the Maragnon, and by the Cordilleras to Peru, men knew not from whence.  To Humboldt himself, I believe, is due the re-discovery of the tree itself and its enormous fruit; and the name of Bertholletia excelsa was given by him.  The tree, he says, ’is not more than two or three feet in diameter, but attains one hundred or one hundred and twenty feet in height.  It does not resemble the Mammee, the star-apple, and several other trees of the Tropics, of which the branches, as in the laurels of the temperate zone, rise straight toward the sky.  The branches of the Bertholletia are open, very long, almost entirely bare toward the base, and loaded at their summits with tufts of very close foliage.  This disposition of the semi-coriaceous leaves, a little silvery beneath and more than two feet long, makes the branches bend down toward the ground, like the fronds of the palm-trees.’

‘The Capuchin monkeys,’ he continues, ’are singularly fond of these “chestnuts of Brazil,” and the noise made by the seeds, when the fruit is shaken as it fell from the tree, excites their appetency in the highest degree.’  He does not, however, believe the ’tale, very current on the lower Oroonoco, that the monkeys place themselves in a circle, and by striking the shell with a stone succeed in opening it.’  That they may try is possible enough; for there is