150 IOWA STUDIES IN NATURAL HISTORY 
anchorage to luxuriant growth and wherever the slope permits 
there are unbroken forests. 
In this valley beside the clear river is the village of Namosi, one 
of the most beautifully located towns in the world. Approach to 
the village is through an avenue of orange trees well grown and 
loaded with fruit when we were there. Above and below where 
the flood plain widens are banana plantations under native eulti- 
vation. On the bases of the mountains are fields of taro, the 
major food product of the region. The houses are grouped in the 
form of a rectangle, around an open grassy space with the home 
of the head man across the end. From the edge of the village 
rises Mount Voma, 2500 feet in height, from whose top on sun- 
light days one may not only see most of Vitilevu Island but 
others of the group as well. Two botanists, Seeman and Horn, 
the one in 1860, and the latter in 1877 climbed this mountain, and 
their books give interesting descriptions of the views from its sum- 
mit. On the other side of the valley the mountains are more slop- 
ing and are heavily forested. 
Our two day stay there was an unending delight. The numer- 
ous trails and willing guides opened up to us a considerable area 
up and down the valley. My most interesting experience while 
there was a climb up the mountain valley to an altitude of per- 
haps five hundred feet where fern forests of considerable extent 
spread out. By following a native trail up past the taro fields I 
was able to get quite close to one of these groups of fern trees. It 
was however with the greatest difficulty that I made the journey 
from the path to the edge of this fern forest. I am sure that I 
spent more than half an hour of the hardest kind of climbing and 
sliding and tumbling, working my way through the jungle for one 
hundred yards into the relatively open association where the fern 
trees were dominant. I was rewarded by an inspiring view; stand- 
ing there one could well imagine himself back millions of years in 
the Carboniferous period. The slender graceful stems of the fern 
trees (Alsophila lunulata) rose to a height of forty feet or more, 
and overhead their beautiful fronds made an almost continuous 
canopy of green. These leaves, each ten to twelve feet in length 
are singularly soft and they sway almost noiselessly in the breeze. 
Over considerable areas these fern trees constitute the dominant 
forms. They shade out the ground vegetation apparently, and 
many climbing plants have some difficulty in ascending the slender 
