Palm Tree


"And the palm tree nodded to the mirror in the jungle"- winter beauty of the tropics, Ormond, Florida. It is thoroughly characteristic glimpse of inland Florida that you get here beside this sleepy bend in the creek. Never a breath of winter cold is felt here. All the year round the air is luxuriously soft and balmy; all the year round there are big, waving fans of green foliage reflected in these still waters. There may be a scaly alligator sunning himself on a fallen log just at the other side of this bank, but alligators are less common than they used to be since the fashionable world began to covet their handsome hides. Squirrels, opossums, raccoons and foxes still enjoy life in this land of their forefathers and various kinds of snakes think they have proprietorship rights here. Years ago a bird lover who would wait and watch from a quiet vantage like this might see wading about among those water-weeds yonder some of the most beautiful of our large native birds, the flamingo, the egret and their near relatives, but now they are to be found only far in towards the trackless, bewildering middle of the great swamps and jungles, where few sportsmen and fewer tourist penetrate. It is difficult to realize that all this part of Florida has been slowly built up form under the sea by accumulated masses of coral formation. For ages on ages the sea-creatures, one generation after another, took from the sea-water the elements needed to make their shapeless stony skeletons. Age after age new coral creatures built their own living houses atop of the deserted remains of their predecessors. When the accumulated mass reached up through the water-level it was a sort of rock island; then winds and waves wearing off fragments and breaking them up into fine sand prepared this new rock to serve as food for stray seeds, and so the land began to grow green. There is no end to the tales of old times which this bit of Florida tells to the scientist.

Photographer:	Unknown	Date:	1904
Publisher & City:	Underwood & Underwood: New York, London, Toronto- Canada, Ottawa- Kansas
Series & Number:

Scan courtesy of Roy Winkelman. Image retouched and converted to anaglyph in 2005 by the Florida Center for Instructional Technology at the University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida. View this image using 3D glasses with the blue lens over the left eye and the red lens over the right eye.


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