The citizens of Medinah delight in speaking of dates as an Irishman does of potatoes--with a kind of familiar fondness: they eat them for medicine as well as food. The fruit is ripe about the middle of May, and the gathering of it forms the Arab’s vintage. The people make merry the more readily because their favourite fruit is liable to a variety of accidents; droughts injure the tree, locusts destroy the produce, and thus the date crop, like most productions which men are imprudent enough to adopt singly as the staff of life, is subject to failure.
Towards the equator the date-tree disappears, while the Doum (_Hyphæne thebaica_), distinguished from most other palms by its branching trunk, each branch being surmounted by a tuft of large stiff flabelliform leaves, assumes a conspicuous place in the landscape. Its fruits, which are of the size of a small apple, and covered with a tough yellow lustrous rind, have a sugary taste, and serve for the preparation of sherbet. The old leaf-stalks with their thorns and sheathes, which remain attached to the trunk, render the task of climbing it next to impossible. The chief seat of this beautiful palm are the banks of the Nile, in the region of the cataracts. In Kordofan the Delebl palms form large clumps with tamarinds, cassias, adansonias, and various mimosas. Straight as an arrow and perfectly smooth-rinded, this magnificent tree rises to the height of a hundred feet, bearing large fan-like leaves, attached to foot-stalks ten feet long, and armed with mighty thorns. From ten to twenty large bunches of nuts, as big as a man’s head, hang beneath the fronds, but unfortunately these fine-looking fruits disappoint the taste.
Thus various forms of palms flourish along the banks of the Nile, but in general Africa has a smaller variety of these trees to boast of than either Asia or America. On the other hand, the forests of Brazil have no palms at all comparable in commercial importance to the Cocos butyracea and the Elæis gumeensis, the oil-teeming fruit trees of tropical West Africa. The productiveness of the Elæis may be inferred from its bearing clusters of from 600 to 800 nuts, larger than a pigeon’s egg, and so full of oil that it may be pressed out with the fingers. As long as the slave trade reigned along the coast of Guinea, these vegetable treasures remained unnoticed; but since England began to raise her voice against this infamous traffic, they have become the object of an immense and constantly increasing commerce.