The Zoologist— June, 1866. 233 



Notes from New Granada. By Henry Biechall, Esq.* 



The Tropical Forest. — You seem to fancy it fine to have eternal 

 summer: if by that you mean continual heat, but no freshness, you are 

 welcome. The unpleasant part of tropical climates, such as we have 

 here, is that there is never anything to correspond with the growth of 

 seasons out of each other. It is all like those horrid dry trees we used 

 to have in the toy farm-yards, — with sheep and other beasts, — always 

 green, but never giving a notion of fresh-growing of spring nor summer 

 fullness either, much less of autumn ripeness. Perhaps it is better 

 than Bradford smoke ; but then one hour thence brings you upon 

 Rumbald's Moor and down into Wharfedale. 1 went on a tour of 

 exploration lately : should like you to have seen my clothes and my 

 legs after some days' tramping in the " gorgeous and ever-green magni- 

 ficence of a tropical forest," which, being interpreted, signifies the 

 rotten, foetid, slimy, tenacious, black mud of a thousand years' decay, 

 mingled with the twisted roots of living — and the sharp sticks, thorns 

 and fragments of dead— vegetajlion of every botanical family under- foot, 

 with a tangled mass overhead like the contents of a gardener's pruning- 

 basket and a woman's sewing-silk bag, mixed together with thorn- 

 bearing stems, set conveniently wherever you are likely to make a false 

 step and catch at the nearest support. Your tropical forest is one of 

 the biggest impostors ever helped into success by poets worthy of 

 Moses or of Warren. The food of the scanty population appears to 

 consist of monkeys, which I saw, opened and trussed, hanging with 

 squirrels, toucans and peccary pigs. I resisted the temptation to 

 cannibalism, until I shall have seen whether Owen or Huxley gets the 

 best of the argument. If the former, it will do to eat freely of what the 

 latter would regard as a prohibited meal to the whole anthropoid race. 

 The absence of life in the forest is very extraordinary. You walk for 

 hours and do not see or hear a living thing bigger than a bee or a 

 tomtit. 1 cannot make it out at all : in the four days scarce saw a 

 butterfly ; a ievf squirrels and common birds only ; but my business 

 was under-ground chiefly. The country up there — say 1000 to 1500 

 feet higher than this, perhaps 4000 or 4500 above sea-level — is honey- 

 combed with the workings of the Spaniards. We went into mine after 

 mine within a few hundred yards, some of great extent — I cannot make 

 out when or why abandoned. But the forest has reasserted its 



* Communicated by liis bvolber, Edwin Birchall, Esq. 

 SECOND SERIES — VOL. I. 2 H 



