THE ENGLISH AND THE TKOPIC.il, FLORAS. 1.5 



on all plants that can be submitted to its influence, that I am compelled to dissent from many of the 

 remarks in Humboldt's Aspects of Nature; especially where, in the last paragraph of the 

 " rhysiogonomy of Plants," he says, that " individual plants languishing in our hothouses, can give 

 but a very faint idea of the majestic vegetation of the tropical zone." In truth, taking the plants 

 as they at present exist in our hothouses, they give an exaggerated idea of tropical vegetation : 

 though this might possibly not be the case thirty or forty years ago. I will admit that we may never 

 reproduce in Europe the Eriodendrons, Bertholletias, Hymenseas, and various Laurels, whose 

 enormous development sometimes exceeds anything that European forests can show ; but of these it 

 is not the beauty which strikes the traveller with admiration. We have trees in England quite as 

 handsome, or handsomer. It is their inordinate size which astonishes.' 



' I do not wish it to be understood that there is never anything gay or beautiful in these forests, 

 that would be going to the contrary extreme ; but when flowers occur in masses, so as to enter into 

 the landscape, they are almost always extremely evanescent. The flowers of most myrtles and 

 Mclastomaceae last only a day. When I look out in a morning over the forest, I sometimes see it 

 variegated with round masses of snowy white —the flowers of scattered trees of some species belonging 

 to one or the other of these tribes ; and I know by experience that if I do not secure the flowers that 

 very day, I shall, in all probability, lose them. Some of these myrtles remind me much of our own 

 hawthorns ; but they rarely approach the hawthorn in beauty as individuals, and they never occur in 

 such continuous masses as to be at all comparable to an old hawthorn hedge in full bloom, or to the 

 venerable hawthorns which, in the spring time, form such striking objects in (for example) Castle 

 Howard Park, and many other localities in England. The campos of Sautarem were at their gayest 

 in the month of June, when a low-spreading leguminous tree {Bowdiehia pubescens), growing 

 solitary, like most trees here, yet in some abundance, was completely clad with flowers of the 

 brightest amethystine blue. Later on, in the month of August, a taller tree of the same family (a 

 new species of Lonehocarpus), put forth long spikes of purple flowers which were certainly very 

 beautiful. Neither of these trees was more handsome than the laburnum, but they are the only 

 approach to vivid colour, in masses, that I have seen on the Amazon; and from the distance between 

 the individual trees, the general effect was much inferior to that of an English orchard in spring ; 

 and not at all comparable to a field of flax, or sainfoin in Ml flower. In the virgin forest, nothing 

 of the sort is ever seen. I repeat, with "E. T." that "the general impression of tropical vegetation 

 has nothing to do with gay colour"; its striking and truly admirable features are (speaking of 

 equinoctial America) the blending of almost every form and family of plants into a mass, which the 

 sye takes in at one view; the immense variety and noble aspect of the palms — the arborescent 

 grasses— the enormous forest trees, decked with parasites on a scale as gigantic as themselves — and, 

 perhaps above all, the abundance and strangeness of form of the twining plants, whose stems vary in 

 thickness from the slenderest threads to huge python-like masses, are now round, now flattened, now 

 knotted, and now twisted with the regularity of a cable.' 



1 .Mr. Ellis's rejoinder to It. T. (Athen. No. 1215.) involves a series of misconceptions. Where— 



The sun shines for ever unchangeably bright,' 



poet the only colour will be white, — as in the burning deserts of Africa. To apply such an 



expression to ibis, the rainiest region in the world, is absurd. Even at Para, throughout the dry 



i, a shower is expe ted every afternoon as a rule. Here, at Sao Gabriel, I am so near the 



actual Equator that 1 sometimes in my excursions cross it twice in the day :— the climate is perhaps 



oo ' inconstant on the face of the earth. As to the quantity of rain that falls, and the rapidity 



with which B shower brews up, on any day of the year, and at any hour of day or night, — the 



variableness of the Bnglisri climate (so much complained of) is constancy itself in comparison. 



Humboldt says, that on the upper Rio Negro it rains eleven months in the year :— he made a mistake 



