44 CHARLES DARWIN 



like a natural palisade with their impenetrable belt the 

 narrow and laborious clearings of over-mastered man. 

 The rich alluvial silt of mighty river systems, the im- 

 memorial manuring of the virgin soil, the fierce energy 

 of an almost equatorial sun, and the universal presence 

 of abundant water, combine to make life in that mar- 

 vellous region unusually wealthy, varied, and crowded, 

 so that the struggle for existence is there perhaps more 

 directly visible to the seeing eye than in any other 

 known portion of God's universe. * Delight itself,' says 

 Darwin in his journal, with that naive simplicity which 

 everywhere forms the chief charm of his direct and un- 

 affected literary style ' delight itself is a weak term to 

 express the feelings of a naturalist who for the first 

 time has wandered by himself in a Brazilian forest. 

 The elegance of the grasses, the novelty of the para- 

 sitical plants, the beauty of the flowers, the glossy green 

 of the foliage, but above all the general luxuriance of 

 the vegetation, filled me with admiration.' In truth, 

 among those huge buttressed trunks, overhung by the 

 unbroken canopy of foliage on the vast spreading and 

 interlacing branches, festooned with lianas and drooping 

 lichens, or beautified by the pendent alien growth of 

 perfumed orchids, Darwin's mind must indeed have 

 found congenial food for apt reflection, and infinite 

 opportunities for inference and induction. From the 

 mere picturesque point of view, indeed, the naturalist 

 enjoys such sights as this a thousand times more truly 

 and profoundly than the mere casual unskilled observer : 

 for it is a shallow, self-flattering mistake of vulgar and 

 narrow minds to suppose that fuller knowledge and 

 clearer insight can destroy or impair the beauty of 



