SOME CURIOUS VEGETABLE GROWTHS. 35 



tute mimic chambers large enough for a standing man to conceal him- 

 self in them. 



Among the other arboreal wonders of Peradenia are the giant 

 bamboos, which are a marvel to all visitors. They here form thickets 

 along the banks of the stream, a hundred feet high, and as many feet 

 wide, bending their great heads, like the waving plume of a giant, high 

 over the river and the adjoining road. On a nearer approach, each of 

 the thickets is seen to consist of cylindrical stems a foot or two thick, 

 which, closely crowded together below on a common root offshoots 

 from a creeping stem diverge as they rise, and bear on slight, nod- 

 ding branches dense tufts of the most delicate foliage. These gi- 

 gantic trees are nothing but grasses. Like all grass-holms, their great 

 hollow reed-stem is divided into joints ; but the sheath of the leaf, 

 which is represented in our tender grasses by a thin scale at the base 

 of the leaves, becomes in these gigantic bamboos a hard, woody plate, 

 that might without further preparation serve the purpose of an armor 

 for the whole breast of a strong man. A three-year-old child could 

 hide itself in one of the joints of the stem. 



Not less interesting than the bamboos and the palms proper are the 

 groups of thorny climbing palms, or rattans (calamus), with their fine 

 waving feather-leaves. Their slender but hard and elastic stems, no 

 thicker than one's finger, climb into the tops of the highest trees, and 

 may reach a length of three or four hundred feet. They are the long- 

 est of all plants. 



Herr Haeckel also speaks of the mangroves, whose branching roots 

 form impenetrable thickets at the mouths of the large rivers ; of the 

 cactus-shaped wolf's-milk {Euphorbia antiquorum), with its naked blue- 

 green prismatic limbs, near the rock-temple of Kaduwella ; and of the 

 Buddha-trees, Bogas, or saci-ed fig-trees (Ficus religiosa), generally 

 found near the Buddhist temples, which with their venerable stems, 

 fantastic roots, and colossal crowns of foliage, form a prominent feat- 

 ure in the picturesque surroundings of those buildings. " Their leaves, 

 which are heart-shaped, with long stalks, quiver like our aspens." At 

 one end of the town of Cultura, a magnificent banyan-tree (Metis In- 

 died) spans the road with its arch of roots. The gigantic trunk has 

 thrown out air-roots which have grounded themselves on the opposite 

 side of the road, and have grown up into large stems. These form 

 now, together with the main stem, a high Gothic archway, to which 

 picturesqueness is added by the ferns, orchids, and climbing vines that 

 have grown upon the trunk. Near it is an India-rubber tree, whose 

 buttressed roots, entwined together and rising in high lattices, form a 

 labyrinth, in the sinuosities of which, when Haeckel visited the place, 

 hosts of children were amusing themselves with playing at hide-and- 

 seek. 



Australia possesses a diversified flora, consisting partly of forms pe- 

 culiarly its own, partly of those allied to African and South American 



