230 SAGACITY AND MORALITY OF PLANTS. 



becomes tightly clasped by a number of inflexible 

 rings. These rings gradually grow larger as the 

 murderer flourishes, rearing its crown of foliage to 

 the sky mingled with that of its neighbour, and in 

 course of time they kill it by stopping the flow of 

 its sap. The strange spectacle then remains of the 

 selfish parasite clasping in its arms the lifeless and 

 decaying body of its victim, which had been a help 

 to its own growth ! 



" The Murderer Sipo merely exhibits, in a more 

 conspicuous manner than usual, the struggle which 

 necessarily exists amongst vegetable forms in these 

 crowded forests, where individual is competing with 

 individual, and species with species, all striving to 

 reach light and air in order to unfold their leaves 

 and perfect their organs of fructification. All 

 species entail in their successful struggles the in- 

 jury or destruction of many of their neighbours or 

 supporters ; but the process is not in others so 

 speaking to the eye as in the case of the Matador. 

 The efforts to spread their roots are as strenuous in 

 some plants and trees as the struggle to mount 

 upwards is in others. From these apparent strivings 

 result the buttressed stems, the dangling air-roots, 

 and other similar phenomena. The competition 

 among organised beings exists everywhere, in every 

 zone, in both the animal and vegetable kingdoms. 

 It is doubtless most severe, on the whole, in tropical 

 countries ; but its display in vegetable forms in 



