Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 49, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 January 1884 — The Cow Tree. [ARTICLE]

The Cow Tree.

Sir Joseph Hooker, in his report on Kew Gardens, gives a sketch of a most interesting botanical curiosity, the Palo de vaca, or cow tree. This tree grows in forests at the foot of certain mountain ranges in Venezuela, and attains a height of 100 feet, and frequently the trunk reaches to seventy feet without a branch. The remarkable characteristic of the tree is the milk which exudes from the trunk when an incision is made. The flavor is of sweet cream with a slightly balsamic taste, but it is very wholesome and nourishing, the composition being said to approach very near the milk of the cow. From the fact that the milk is somewhat glutinous it would seem that the tree is of the caoutchouc order. Seeds which have been sent to Bombay and the colonies are said to be thriving well. It is noteworthy, as an example of the law of compensation traceable in nature generally, that this cow tree seems originally to have been a native of a country where-milk giving animals were formerly totally unknown.