hom they insisted, with
cannon and musket, must receive Christianity through the French clergy
of the Order of the Sacred Heart of Jesus instead of through English
dissenters. From the plateau we could see the immense extent of the
forests, which rose almost from the water to the tops of the mountains.

A dozen magnificent kinds of trees were all about us. The earth wore
a verdant coat of grass, ferns, and vines, so profuse and bright that
by contrast a remembrance of the barren parts of America crossed my
mind, with the fulsome praise of them by the pious thieves of that
region who sell them. It would be impossible and cruel, I reflected,
to convey to those extravagants in adjectives the richness of herbage
and the brilliancy of scene about the isthmus. The vegetation was
ampler than anywhere else in Tahiti.

The tamanu-, the hotu-, and the mape-trees were in abundance. The
tamanu yields tacamac, a yellow, resinous substance with a strong
odor and a bitter, aromatic taste, that is used as incense and in
ointments. The Tahitians call the tamanu the healing-tree. It grows
just above high water on any kind of shore, embowering, with dark
foliage, and peculiarly easeful in midday on the hot sands. I have
had a tamanu-leaf soaked in fresh water laid upon my eye inflamed by
too long a vigil in the sun on the reef. The small gray ball within
its round green fruit affords a greenish oil that is a liniment of
wizardry for bruises, stiffness, rheumatism, and fevers. In every
house was a gourd stored with it.

The mape, the Tahitian chestnut, grew farther from the water, a
powerful, commanding figure, with flowers of sublimated sweetness, and
with it the tiairi, or tutui-tree, covered with blossoms, like white
lilac, and bearing nuts with oily kernels. It is the candlenut-tree,
which has furnished lights for Tahitians since they wandered to
these latitudes. The nuts are baked to make brittle their shell,
and the kernels of walnut size easily extracted and pierced. Strung
on the midrib of a palm-leaf, the combination makes wax and wick,
and has lighted many a council and many a dance in Polynesia.

The pandanus likes the coral sand, and is in appearance a tree out of a
dream. It grows twenty feet high and stands on aerial roots resembling
inclined stilts. The leaves are in tufts at the tips of the branches,
set like a screw, twisting around the stem in graceful curves, and
marking the stem with a spiral pattern from the root u