220 ROUND THE YEAR 



The plants of the Paramos are low, an obvious 

 advantage where the wind is cold and boisterous. 

 Many form rosettes of leaves ; some of them lay 

 up stores of food underground ; a few, and these are 

 characteristic members of the Paramos flora, carry 

 their rosettes on stunted pedestals (stems) which are 

 clothed with dead leaves. The leaves of all the plants 

 are small, sometimes reduced to needles ; some are 

 rolled-in, others woolly, others leathery ; a few are 

 pressed close against the stems which support them. 

 We find in the vegetation of the Paramos all the 

 characteristic features of a xerophilous flora, except 

 that succulent plants (like Stonecrops) are few or 

 wanting. Bleak winds, it would appear, produce much 

 the same effect upon plants as drought. 



Goebel expressly maintains this proposition, that a 

 low temperature with wind produces the effect of 

 drought, and cites such instances as the drying-up of 

 our European grasses in winter, when the ground is 

 saturated with water. In the Paramos certain plants 

 with woolly leaves actually grow in bogs. On the 

 Roraima Mountains (between Venezuela and British 

 Guiana, as we used to suppose) is a small-leaved 

 Myrtle, which might be supposed from its appearance 

 to be adapted to a dry situation ; it really lives in 

 the spray of a waterfall, but then the water is ice- 

 cold. 



The plantations about my house testify to the 

 scorching effect of wind. To the windward side, 

 which here is the west, the evergreens were terribly 

 punished by the frost of last spring, but on the leeward 

 side many of them are quite uninjured, and have since 



