hollowing out the elbow of a tree, and the ashes are blown away by the breath; they are then pounded on a stone, and again placed in the wooden vessel, shaken, and the husks blown away, until only the flour remains, which is mixed with water, and made into rolls about eighteen inches in length. These rolls are baked and eaten.
As this plant is of great interest, I give a figure and a description of it from Sir William Hooker's work (Fig. 19), placed at my disposal by the Government Botanist.
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| FIG. 19. |
"The caudex creeps for some length, and is scarcely so thick as a crow's quill, rooting, branched, and knotty; the knots are densely woolly with ferruginous hair, and seem to be the rudiments of a new cluster of fronds. Fronds or leaves from the apex of a woolly knot or branch, two to four from one point. Petioles from four inches to a span long, erect, flexuose, slender, silky, bearing at the point four spreading broadly cuneate leaflets, finely and radiately veined, the veins here and there anastomosing, villous with dense silky hairs, especially beneath; the hairs often deciduous above, and occasionally beneath, subulate, articulated, tawny. From the very base, among the cluster of petioles, arise one or two erect peduncles, about two inches long, in other respects resembling the petioles; these are terminated each by an obliquely erect, ovate, compressed capsule, transversely striated, with a gibbosity on one side at the base, densely clothed with imbricating, subulate, jointed hairs."
"Fig. 1, Leaflet; fig. 2, Capsule; fig. 3, The same cut through transversely; fig. 4, Hairs from the Capsule—all more or less magnified."[1]
[The figure is reduced one-half in the engraving here given from Sir William Hooker's lithograph.]
In New South Wales the natives have, amongst many other fruits, the Geebung, a native plum, and the "five corners."
The Nonda (Parinarium Nonda—F. v. Mueller) of Northern Queensland, bears a fruit in size and appearance resembling a yellow egg-plum, and in taste like a mealy potato, with, however, a trace of that astringency so common to Australian fruits. It is much eaten by the natives.[2]
- ↑ Icones Plantarum, by Sir William Jackson Hooker, K.H., Vol. VI., 1854.
- ↑ Overland Expedition of the Messrs. Jardine, p. 76.
