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NATURAL HISTORY 



}\'iUiam Beebe American Museum of Xatural History 



CouTtestj U. S. Forest Serrice 



A comparison of two widely separated forests. The right-hand photograph is a 

 typical northern mesophyte beech-maple association, the left-hand photograph a 

 tropical rain forest of British Guiana. Note the superficial likenesses and dif- 

 ferences. 



or seventy feet without a branch, festooned with long cHmbing hanas, 

 which in this way work from the forest floor into the upper zones. 

 Four general horizontal regions, or zones of life, are distinguishable, 

 namely, the forest floor, the lower jungle up to about twenty feet, the 

 mid-jungle up to seventy feet, and the tree-tops, towering a hundred 

 and fifty or two himdred feet high. Life at first seems almost absent 

 in the jungle to the casual observer, but if one stops, and simply 

 looks, the jungle wakes up and life appears everyu^here. The forest 

 floor is covered with the accumulated debris of ages, fallen trees in 

 different stages of decay, fungi, mosses, and lichens, with a generous 

 covering of brown leaves, for here the leaves fall all the year around, 

 instead of only in the autumn season as in northern regions. The 

 ground area is occupied by occasional deer, paca, and tapirs, with 

 agoutis and armadillos found more frequently. Partridge and the 

 strange tropical tinamou are seen here and there, as well as jungle 

 mice and rats, salamanders, frogs, a few snakes, innumerable scorpions, 

 beetles, grubs, worms, and rarely, the unique and interesting Peripatus. 

 In the low jungle are found manikins of several species, ant-birds, 

 with trumpeters and jungle-wrens, while at night opossums climb 



