A Botanical Expedition to Nicaragua. 357 



machete^ a long knife, with which the traveller must literally 

 tunnel his way in many places through the walls of vegetation. 

 The trees, many of which are very tall and 8 to 14 feet in 

 diameter, are scarcely as closely placed together as are those 

 in our northern forests, but the intervening spaces are crowd- 

 ed with shrubs, and vines, and numerous other plants so that, 

 particularly in lower places, dense jungles are formed. More- 

 over each tree is a veritable garden in itself. The masses of 

 parasites and epiphytes which cover the larger branches of 

 the trees, and often extend down the trunk and alon<i the 

 smaller branches to their very tips, form a perfect canopy 

 overhead through which the sun's rays never penetrate. 

 Ferns, Bromelias, Orchids, Mosses, and many other plants 

 crowd their hosts with a dense mass of multi-colored vegeta- 

 tion. In their active struggle for existence with their more 

 powerful neighbors of the forest these plants have probably 

 gradually ascended, in their search for the sun's light, to the 

 upper branches of the very neighbors who sought to crowd 

 them out, thus transferring the struggle from the surface of 

 the soil to the air above. So firmly is this habit fixed how- 

 ever, that even where a tree stands alone its trunk and branch- 

 es are almost invariably covered with these plants. Their 

 abundance and variety may be judged from the fact that upon 

 a single "Jicara-tree," not over 20 feet high, which stood in a 

 clearing near Castillo, the writer counted 40 species of epiphy- 

 tes, mostly Ferns, Orchids, and Bromelias. 



On some of the higher grounds the vines, which in the 

 lower jungles hang in such profusion from every limb, and 

 the underbrush which with these renders progress so difficult 

 to the traveller, are less abundant at least near the ground, 

 and hence it is possible for one to move about more freely, 

 the underbrush being in reality placed overhead, for the num- 

 ber of epiphytes remains undiminished even in places of this 

 kind. 



But whether the localit}- is high or low, the same deep, 

 dark, reeking forest, whose profound silence is scarely broken 



