FEKNS. 317 



of the hurricane, all are overspread with this verdant 

 cloth, which softens all the angles, permitting the 

 general outlines to appear, but concealing the rough- 

 nesses. 



Ferns, too, delight in this softened light, and they 

 are here' by myriads. Here, at the base of a giant 

 fig-tree, is a noble crown of the Golden Phlebodium, 

 with its elegantly pinnate fronds arching widely over 

 our heads ; beautiful are its thick twisted rhizomes, 

 covered with golden hair that glistens with satiny 

 lustre,* and the delicately fine rootlets, that cling to 

 the gray roots of the tree, crossing and re-crossing, 

 and winding over them, like a tangled web of brown 

 thread. In the crevices of the rocks are tufts of 

 lovely light-green Maidenhair, some more minutely 

 delicate than our own Devonshire species, others with 

 noble trapezoidal pinnae of large size, which gracefully 

 diminish in regular graduation to the tip of the 

 pointed frond. 



And here are ferns which are altogether strange 

 to a European eye climbing ferns, whose slender 

 scaly stems, something like the body of a snake, run 

 up the lofty trees, clinging to the bark, fringed 

 throughout their irregular windings with small rigid 

 fronds, like the oval leaves of a cranberry or myrtle. 



Stranger still than these are the noble Tree-ferns. 

 Here we approach a part of the humid forest, where 

 these forms are characteristic. Slender stems, as 

 straight as an arrow., thirty feet high, but no thicker 

 than a man's thigh, covered with the diamond-shaped 



