Cuap. II. THE MURDERER SIPO. 27 
Travels. I observed many specimens. The base of its stem would be 
unable to bear the weight of the upper growth ; it is obliged therefore to 
support itself on a tree of another species. In this it is not essentially 
different from other climbing trees and plants, but the way the Matador 
sets about it is peculiar, and produces certainly a disagreeable impression. 
It springs up close to the tree on which it intends to fix itself, and the 
wood of its stem grows by spreading itself like a plastic mould over one 
side of the trunk of its supporter. It then puts forth, from each side, 
an arm-like branch, which grows rapidly, and looks as though a stream 
of sap were flowing and hardening as it went. This adheres closely to 
the trunk of the victim, and the two arms meet on the opposite side 
and blend together. These arms are put forth at somewhat regular 
intervals in mounting upwards, and the victim, when its strangler is 
full grown, 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. Its ends have been served—it has flowered and fruited, 
reproduced and disseminated its kind ; and now, when the dead trunk 
moulders away, its own end approaches ; its support is gone, and itself 
also falls. 
The Murderer Sipé merely exhibits, in a more conspicuous manner 
then 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 injury or destruction 
of many of their neighbours or supporters, but the process is not in 
others so speaking to the eye as it is 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 in others. From these apparent 
strivings result the buttressed stems, the dangling air roots, and other 
similar phenomena. The competition amongst organised beings has 
been prominently brought forth in Darwin’s Origin of Speczes; it isa 
fact which much be always kept in view in studying these subjects. 
It 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 the forest is no exceptional 
phenomenon. It is only more conspicuously exhibited owing perhaps 
to its affecting principally the vegetative organs—root, stem, and leaf— 
whose growth is also stimulated by the intense light, the warmth, and 
the humidity. The competition exists also in temperate countries, but 
it is there concealed under the external appearance of repose which 
vegetation wears. It affects, in this case, perhaps more the reproductive 
than the vegetative organs, especially the flowers, which it is probable 
are far more general decorations in the woodlands of high latitudes 
than in tropical forests. ‘This, however, is a difficult subject, and one 
which requires much further investigation. 
