8 Flowe7^s and theu^ Pedigrees. 



wild beast in all seriousness, with his solid coat of 

 bronze-burnished armour, his huge hook-ringed an- 

 tennae, and his fearful branched horn, ten times more 

 terrible than that of a furious rhinoceros charging 

 madly through the African jungle. Why, if you will 

 only throw yourself honestly into the situation, and 

 realise that awful life-and-death struggle now going on 

 between an ant and a May-fly before our very eyes, 

 you will see that Livingstone, and Serpa Pinto, and 

 Gordon Gumming are simply nowhere beside you : 

 that even Jules Verne's wildest story is comparatively 

 tame and commonplace in the light of that marvellous 

 miniature forest. Such a jumble of puzzle-monkeys, 

 and bamboos, and palms, and banyan trees, and crags, 

 and roots, and rivers, and precipices was never seen ; 

 inhabited by such a terrible and beautiful phantasma- 

 goria of dragons, hippogriffs, unicorns, rocs, chimaeras, 

 serpents, and wyverns as no mediaeval fancy ever in- 

 vented, no Greek mythologist ever dreamt of, and no 

 Arabian story-teller ever fabled. And yet, after all, 

 to our clumsy big eyes, it is but a little patch of 

 familiar English grass and mosses, crawled over by 

 half a dozen sleepy slugs and long-legged spiders, and 

 slimy earthworms. 



Still, if you so throw yourself into the scene, you 

 cannot avoid carrying your own individuality with 



