THE VIRGIN FOREST 



and falling to the ground, while their seedlings are stifled by the 

 invading beech-trees. 



Owing to the leafy screens of the beech-trees, the beech wood 

 appears to be traversed by horizontal bands of green, and in the 

 spring, when the green bands are drawn far and near across the grey 

 trunks and the russet carpet of fallen leaves, they give the wood a 

 delicate and peculiar charm. Moreover, the sun shines through the 

 screens of foliage and sheds a green, subdued light through the 

 tree-tops. This tender flood of green sunlight gives our beech 

 woods a mysterious character; they are like the woods in a fairy- 

 tale. This impressed me more particularly after my return from 

 Brazil. 



Transparence in the one case and reflection in the other — as Haber- 

 landt pointed out — constitute the great difTerence between the 

 European and the tropical woods. In a European wood most of the 

 light seems to fall through the screens of the green foliage, whereas 

 in the tropics a thousand rays of sunlight drift down between the 

 branches of the trees, and are reflected by the leaves in a dazzling 

 shimmer. For the European there is something exhausting about 

 this glittering forest; one feels as though the gaze rebounded from 

 all these brilliant points of light, whereas it gratefully drinks in the 

 tender, translucent greens of a European wood. 



The uniform illumination of the tropical forest enables plants 

 to spring up everywhere, and this gives the interior of the forest a 

 richness and variety unknown to Europe. The charm of a northern 

 forest is on the whole divided between the roof of leafage, the 

 colonnades of the tree-trunks, and the weeds and flowers that more 

 or less cover the ground. In the tropical forest the plants and flowers 

 are found sometimes on the ground, sometimes on the branches of 

 the trees, now far overhead, now almost within reach, here growing 

 upwards, and there sprouting forth sideways; and the result is a 

 picture full of enchanting variety, and a mass of minute detail 

 which would mock the efforts of a modern painter with his few 

 broad brush-strokes. But the lianas and arboreal plants which play 

 so prominent a part in the structure of the tropical forest are plants 

 of so peculiar a character that I must speak of them in a separate 

 chapter. 



In the virgin forest of Alto da Serra (Plate 13) near Sao Paulo, 

 one of the loveliest jewels of Brazil, this peculiarity of the tropical 

 forest is very apparent. The forest begins where the plateau^ over 

 2,500 feet in height, ends in an almost perpendicular drop; and 



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