THE VEGETABLE WORLD. 329 



actual organization, but from the considerations regarding 

 the peculiar kind and mode in which they take part in the 

 composition of a picture of vegetation, must we here 

 include among the leafless plants, or rather those influencing 

 merely by their stem, all those which with the Spanish 

 colonists in America, we comprehend under the name of 

 the Llano or Liane-form.* Stretched like strong rigging, 

 or winding serpent-like in and out, now like cords, now 

 flat and strap-like, and now alternately, left and right, with 

 flattened, crest-like protuberances, the Bauhinias, Aristo- 

 lochias, Convolvuluses, Bignonias and others extend forty, 

 fifty, nay one hundred, or several hundred feet, leaf- 

 less and without a branch, from tree to tree, in the 

 primeval forests of the tropics ; frequently ascending upon 

 one tree, circling it even to choking, then leaping over on 

 to another, next falling in a festoon, and then climbing 

 up again to the topmost summit of a third, where the 

 plant perhaps waves a bunch of the most splendid flowers 

 in the lighter air ; while they mockingly leave to the wan- 

 derer in the forest's shade nothing but their naked stems, 

 with which they often interweave an almost impenetrable 

 thicket. From this reason, in spite of all the industry of 

 the collectors, there are very few cases in which we know 

 how to refer the numerous specimens of the flowers pre- 

 served in our herbaria, to the equally abundantly collected, 

 but often most strangely aberrant forms of stems. 



The two elements which present themselves as it were 

 in an isolated condition in the foregoing families are con- 

 nected into a wholly peculiar design in the next ; in the 

 beautiful bunch of highly developed leaves and the true, 



* The Frontispiece exhibits one of the smaller forms, as a fes- 

 toon of a splendid flowered Ipomcea across the middle of the 

 picture. 



