ROBBERY AND MURDER. 233 



of the forest in Jamaica : " A steep rocky hill rises 

 abruptly, covered with pristine woods. The boughs 

 of an immense Fig-tree, which had been prostrated 

 in a storm a few weeks before, enabled me to climb 

 the ascent ; but I was astonished at the difficulty 

 of penetrating the forest. The numbers of tough 

 withes, many of them fearfully spinous, that entwine 

 about the trees and about each other ; the long 

 prickly Cacti, too, that trail here and there ; the 

 lianes, that resemble ropes, or lines, or strings, accord- 

 ing to their thickness, hanging down in loops, or 

 loosely waving to and fro — are wonderful ; these 

 last frequently extend from a lofty bough nearly to 

 the ground, without a branch or leaf till near the 

 extremity, where the cord commonly divides into 

 three or four more slender ones. Some of the larger 

 ones are woody, and are often seen tightly twisted 

 together, like the strands of a cable." 



I shall conclude these varying but coincident 

 references to the vegetable strife and competition 

 raging in tropical forests, both in the Old and New 

 World, by the following suggestive paragraph 

 from Kingsley's At Last: "As we proceeded we 

 entered a forest still unburnt, and a tangle of beauty, 

 such as we saw at Chaguanas. . . . Overhead sprawled 

 and dangled the Common Vine-Bamboo {Panicum 

 divaricattmt), ugly and unsatisfactory in form, because 

 it has not yet, seemingly, made up its mind whether 

 it will become an arborescent or a climbing grass ; 



