174 KEW GARDENS 



and wide authority a Ulysses indeed, Dr. A. R. 

 Wallace, who after years spent in the richest 

 regions on both sides of the world, can tell us 

 that the luscious shows picked into a nosegay 

 in our hot -houses ill counterfeit those natural 

 jungles where blossoms are drowned in a flood 

 of sombre green, and the brightest flowers, 

 climbing upwards in the universal struggle for 

 light, waste their full blown beauty on the 

 parching sky, invisible to the wanderer, unless 

 in an airship he could surmount the lofty roof 

 of foliage beneath which he may have to push 

 and hew his tunnelled way through obstruction 

 of dense underwood. This explorer declares 

 that he has wandered for days in tropical forests 

 without coming on any bloom so gay as a haw- 

 thorn or a honeysuckle ; and he has never seen 

 in Brazil or Malaysia "such brilliant masses of 

 colour as even England can show in her furze- 

 clad commons, her heathery mountain-sides, her 

 glades of wild hyacinth, her fields of poppies, 

 her meadows of buttercups and daisies." 



Sir E. Im Thurn bears out Wallace's view 

 with some qualification: "At no time is the 

 Guiana leafage as splendid as in an ordinary 

 English wood either in the early spring or in 



