ii EQUATORIAL VEGETATION 265 



generally have showy flowers, for it is doubtful whether the 

 proportion is at all greater in tropical than in temperate 

 zones. On such natural exposures as steep mountain sides, 

 the banks of rivers, or ledges of precipices, and on the 

 margins of such artificial openings as roads and forest clear- 

 ings, whatever floral beauty is to be found in the more 

 luxuriant parts of the tropics is exhibited. But even in such 

 favourable situations it is not the abundance and beauty of 

 the flowers but the luxuriance and the freshness of the foliage, 

 and the grace and infinite variety of the forms of vegetation, 

 that will most attract the attention and extort the admiration 

 of the traveller. Occasionally indeed you will come upon 

 shrubs gay with blossoms or trees festooned with flowering 

 creepers; but, on the other hand, you may travel for a 

 hundred miles and see nothing but the varied greens of the 

 forest foliage and the deep gloom of its tangled recesses. In 

 Mr. Belt's. Naturalist in Nicaragua, he thus describes the 

 great virgin forests of that country which, being in a mount- 

 ainous region and on the margin of the equatorial zone, are 

 among the most favourable examples. " On each side of the 

 road great trees towered up, carrying their crowns out of 

 sight amongst a canopy of foliage, and with lianas hanging 

 from nearly every bough, and passing from tree to tree, 

 entangling the giants in a great network of coiling cables. 

 Sometimes a tree appears covered with beautiful flowers 

 which do not belong to it but to one of the lianas that twines 

 through its branches and sends down great rope-like stems to 

 the ground. Climbing ferns and vanilla cling to the trunks, 

 and a thousand epiphytes perch themselves on the branches. 

 Amongst these are large arums that send down long aerial 

 roots, tough and strong, and universally used instead of 

 cordage by the natives. Amongst the undergrowth several 

 small species of palms, varying in height from two to fifteen 

 feet, are common ; and now and then magnificent tree ferns 

 sending off their feathery crowns twenty feet from the ground 

 delight the sight by their graceful elegance. Great broad- 

 leaved heliconias, leathery melastomae, and succulent-stemmed, 

 lop-sided, leaved, and flesh-coloured begonias are abundant, 

 and typical of tropical American forests ; but not less so are 

 the cecropia trees, with their white stems and large palmated 



