The world-encircling cocoanut-palm is found about the shore of tropical North America, and there, as elsewhere, serves a great variety of uses, being a greater blessing, especially to the natives and the poorer descendants of European and African immigrants, than even the royal palm. The economic importance of its wood-fibres, leaves, and fruit are too well known to require re-enumeration.
While the wealth of palms is confined to the hot, moist regions of Mexico, Central America, and the West Indies, several members of the same great family are found in the United States. The royal palm is native to southern Florida, while the low fan-palms cover much of the northern portion of the same State, and occur even about the Ozark Hills in Arkansas, and the palmetto, growing to be a stately tree, is found near the coast in the Carolinas and is the emblem of South Carolina, the "Palmetto State."
The ferns, although abundant, especially in moist woods from Alaska southward, throughout the continent, reach their greatest variety and richest luxuriance in the West Indies and Central America, where the graceful and most artistically beautiful tree-ferns add an indescribable charm to the always varied foliage. The tree-ferns grow farther up the mountains of the torrid zone than do the larger palms (in the same manner that the smaller ferns extend much farther north than the most hardy palmettoes), and form a conspicuous feature in the foreground of nearly every wide-reaching prospect in the more elevated portions of the West Indies, Central America, and south-central Mexico.
In addition to the palms and ferns, the tropical forests of North America contain a large number of trees of great economic importance. Chief among these are the mahogany, which is native to the lands bordering the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico, and reaches the largest size and produces the most beautiful and most highly prized wood on Cuba, Haiti, the Bahamas, and Jamaica. As is well known, this hard, dark, heavy, fine-grained, and exceedingly durable wood has been used for the best grades of cabinet-work for about two centuries, and is still unsurpassed for the beauty of its grain, susceptibility of a high polish, and the several ways in which it is adapted for the carver's tool. On account of the great and long-continued demand for its wood it has become scarce in all but the most inaccessible localities. When allowed to reach full maturity it is a large, wide-spreading tree with numerous branches, looking not unlike a giant oak, but has pinnate leaves and small, although somewhat conspicuous, white flowers.