THE ROMANCE OF NATURAL HISTORY. 



as the masts of a ship are laced with the various 

 stays, braces, and halyards ; some of them stout 

 and cable-like, others mere slender cords, passing 

 to and fro, hanging in loops, or loosely waving 

 in the air. 



Yet amidst all this magnificence of vegetation, 

 there was nothing that took so strong a hold on 

 my imagination as the arborescent ferns. To see 

 these plants, whose elegant grace I had so often 

 admired in our English lanes, so magnified that 

 the crown of out-curving fronds shaded an area 

 of twenty feet in diameter, and yet preserving all 

 the voluptuous lightness and minute subdivision 

 which are so characteristic of these plants, and 

 this feathery diadem of leaves reared on the sum- 

 mit of a stem as high as its own width ;— to stand 

 under the beautiful arch and gaze upwards on the 

 filigree-fretted fronds that formed a great umbrella 

 of verdure,— this was most charming, and never to 

 be forgotten. 



The eloquent pen of Charles Darwin has revivi- 

 fied for us, with a peculiar charm, the impressions 

 made on his refined and poetic mind by the 

 strange scenes of other lands. His first experiences 

 of the forests of South America he has thus re- 

 corded:— "The day has passed delightfully. De- 

 light itself, however, 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 parasitical 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. A most paradoxical mixture of 

 sound and silence pervades the shady parts of the 

 wood. The noise from the insects is so loud, that 

 it may be heard even in a vessel anchored several 

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