34 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The eye was constantly delighted with the endless vai-iety of the cloth- 

 ing of the palm-stems with festoons of pepper-wort and other vines, 

 swung like beautiful and artfully arranged garlands from tree-top to 

 tree-top, and hanging down in bouquets of dense foliage set off with 

 bright flowers. Under and among the stately palms were other trees, 

 the noble mango and the large bread-fruit tree, with its thick, dark- 

 green crown of leaves. The slender, pillar-like stem of the handsome 

 papaya-tree ( Carica papaya) was elegantly inlaid and adorned with a 

 regular diadem of broad, palmated leaves ; and jasmin, orange, and 

 lemon trees in varieties were covered over and over with fragrant 

 white blossoms. 



As the road neared the sea-shore, the pandanus, or screw-trees 

 (Pandanns odoratissimus), picturesquely growing upon the rocky 

 hills, attracted attention. These are among the most remarkable and 

 characteristic plants of the trojrics. They are nearly allied to the 

 palms, and are often called screw-palms, or, improperly, screw-pines. 

 The cylindrical stem of this plant, which seldom reaches more than from 

 twenty to forty feet in height, is bent and twisted, and its branches 

 are forked like a chandelier. Each limb bears on the end a dense tuft 

 of large, sword-shaped leaves, like those of the dracama and the yucca. 

 The leaves are sometimes sea-green, sometimes dark-green, and are 

 arranged spirally at the base, so that the limb resembles a regularly 

 turned screw. At the bases of the leaf -tufts hang clusters of white, 

 extremely fragrant blossoms, or large red fruits like the anana. The 

 most remarkable feature of the plant is afforded by the numerous air- 

 roots which branch out from the trunk and ramify again, lower down, 

 fastening themselves in the earth when they reach the ground, and 

 forming buttresses to support the main stem. The tree looks as if it 

 were walking on stilts. 



The entrance to the Botanic Garden of Peradenia is through a no- 

 ble avenue of India-rubber trees. This tree, which is known to us of 

 the north only by puny specimens in greenhouses, grows in these trop- 

 ical regions to a giant's stature, of a size comparable to that of our 

 largest oaks. An immense crown of many thousand leaves covers 

 with the aid of its horizontal limbs, which are thirty or forty feet long, 

 the area of a stately palace ; while from the base of its thick trunk 

 extends a frame-work of roots over a space of often between one and 

 two hundred feet in diameter, and much larger than would correspond 

 with the height of the tree. This wonderful structure consists of 

 twenty or thirty chief roots proceeding from as many corresponding 

 ribs in the lower part of the trunk, and spreading themselves like great 

 snakes on the ground. The tree is hence called the snake-tree by the 

 natives, and has been compared by the poets to the coiled serpents 

 of the Laocoon. The roots, with the ribs which mark their swelling 

 out from the trunk, form strong buttresses to the tree, and enable it to 

 bid defiance to the storm. The spaces between the buttresses consti- 



