THE VEGETABLE WORLD. 345 



precedented mightiness crowd together, interweaving their 

 branches and spreading an obscure twilight in the brightest 

 day. The soil consists merely of half-decayed blocks piled 

 one upon another, alternating with a fathomless mud, in 

 which the voracious alligators and snapping turtles wallow, 

 the sole lords of this hell, steaming up almost beneath the 

 tropical sun, thus in the height of Summer ; in the Spring 

 the thick, miry floods of the issuing streams impetuously 

 overflow this malignant vegetation for many miles. Thus 

 these Cypress-swamps, of which Seatsfield has given us such 

 a vivid picture, correspond in inland countries, to the Man- 

 grove-woods which border the mouths of almost all the 

 tropical rivers. Composed of a very few species of plants, 

 among which the Mangrove-tree is the most common, they 

 are especially striking from the great number of strong 

 roots, springing out high up the stem, and bearing this 

 aloft above the surface. The peculiar habitation of this 

 plant is the brackish water, which consists, at the ebb, of 

 the fresh water of the river, which is dislodged by the sea- 

 water at the flood. The numerous roots often form a so 

 thickly entangled mass that the interspaces may be stopped 

 up by the falling leaves, collecting thus a soil for a new 

 vegetation, beneath which, at different hours of the day, 

 roll the waves of the river and the sea. But more fre- 

 quently the roots merely operate to retard the flow of the 

 water and to retain in their interlacements the vegetable 

 and animal bodies driven down the river, which then decay 

 here in contact with sea-water and its salts. In these regions 

 the terrible sulphuretted-hydrogen gas is developed so 

 abundantly, poisoning the atmosphere, that the natives who 

 have lived in these abodes from their youth upward, totter 

 about as it were like spectres, while death almost inevitably 

 snatches off the Europeans who enter there. These woods 



