282 
NATURE 
[ Aug. 10, 1871 

KINGSEENS Ate GAS! 
At Last: a Christmas tin the West Indies. By Charles 
Kingsley. With Illustrations. In two volumes. (Mac- 
millan and Co., 1871.) 
BOOK on the West Indies by an ordinary tourist 
would be hardly bearable. Mr. Trollope was 
amusingly brilliant as well as philosophical, and we read 
him with pleasure ; but the author of “ Westward Ho!” 
possesses a wealth of knowledge both in history and in 
natural science wherewith to illustrate his journey, which, 
even without his charming style and world-wide popularity, 
would render his book attractive to many a thoughtful 
reader. To him the air of the West Indies is “ full of 
ghosts” of gallant soldiers and sailors, whose deeds of 
daring have made almost every bay and roadstead famous, 
and who, he thinks, might well ask us to render an account 
of our stewardship of those beautiful islands, which they 
won for us with precious blood, and which we, too ignorant 
and helpless to govern them properly, have misused and 
neglected, Passing by Dominica recalls one of those 
deeds, the record of which must thrill the heart of every 
Englishman: “here Rodney, on the glorious 12th of 
April broke Count de Grasse’s line (teaching thereby 
Nelson to do the same in like case), took and destroyed 
seven French ships of the line, and scattered the rest, pre- 
venting the French fleet from joining the Spaniards at His- 
paniola, thus saving Jamaica and the whole West Indies, 
and brought about by that single tremendous blow the 
honourable peace of 1783. On what a scene of crippled 
and sinking, shattered and triumphant ships, in what a 
sea, must the conquerors have looked round from the For- 
midable’s poop, with De Grasse at luncheon with Rodney 
in the cabin below, and not, as he had boastfully promised, 
on board his own Ville de Paris !” 
A little farther he comes in sight of “an isolated rock, 
of the shape, but double the size, of one of the great 
Pyramids, which was once the British sloop of war, 
Diamond Rock,’ and tells us the interesting tale, not of 
any magical transformation or nautical legend, but of one 
of those inspirations of genius which converted an almost 
inaccessible rock into a fortress, which was manned by 
120 men and boys, and for a year and a half swept the 
seas, being “ borne on the books of the Admiralty as Her 
Majesty’s ship Diamond Rock.” 
More suited, however, to our present purpose is the 
reminiscence of the eruption of the volcano of St. Vin- 
cent in 1812, which lasted three days and nights, covering 
most of the island with ashes, and utterly ruining whole 
estates. In Barbadoes, eighty miles to windward, the 
dust fell so thick that total darkness continued till near 
midday, and strange to say, with the darkness was un- 
usual silence, for the trade wind had fallen dead, and the 
everlasting roar of the surf was gone. As the dust-cloud 
drifted away and the sun again appeared, the trade wind | 
blew suddenly once more out of the east, and the surf 
roared again along the shore. The authority for this fact 
Mr. Kingsley considers to be sufficient, but its explanation 
is by no means easy. 
Arriving at Trinidad, our author fairly revels in the 
delights of tropical life, scenery, and vegetation. The 
flowers and forest trees, the creepers and climbers, and the 
noble palms, fill his soul with delight; and he is never 


tired of painting the scenes around him in his own pic- 
turesque and glowing language. The force and vigour of 
vegetable growth, the hum and glitter of insects, the strange 
birds and the howling monkeys, all have the more charm 
for him that he already knows so much about them, and 
that they satisfy an intelligent and highly-cultivated 
curiosity. Here is a little bit out of his picture of the 
“High Woods,” as the virgin forests are called in 
Trinidad :— 
“In Europe a forest is usually made up of one domi- 
nant plant—of firs or of pines, of oaks or of beeches, of 
birch or of heather. Here no two plants seem alike. 
There are more species on an acre here than in all the 
New Forest, Savernake, or Sherwood. Stems rough, 
smooth, prickly, round, fluted, stilted, upright, sloping, 
branched, arched, jointed, opposite-leaved, alternate- 
leaved, leafless, or covered with leaves of every conceivable 
pattern, are jumbled together, till the eye and brain are 
tired of continually asking ‘What next?’ The stems are 
of every colour—copper, pink, grey, green, brown, black 
as if burnt, marbled with lichens, many of them silvery 
white, gleaming afar in the bush, furred with mosses and 
delicate creeping film-ferns, or laced with the air-roots of 
some parasite aloft. Up this stem scrambles a climbing 
Seguine (Pizlodendron) with entire leaves ; up the next 
another quite different with deeply cut leaves ; up the next 
the Ceriman ((Jonstera pertusa) spreads its huge leaves, 
latticed and forked again and again. So fast do they 
grow, that they have not time to fill up the spaces between 
their nerves, and are consequently full of oval holes ; 
and so fast does its spadix of flowers expand, that an 
actual genial heat and fire of passion, which may be 
tested by the thermometer, or even by the hand, is given 
off during fructification. Look on at the next stem. Up 
it and down again a climbing fern, which is often seen in 
hothouses, has tangled its finely-cut fronds. Up the next 
a quite different fern is crawling, by pressing tightly to the 
rough bark its creeping root-stalks, furred like a hare’s 
leg. Up the next the prim little griffe-chatte plant has 
walked by numberless clusters of small cat’s-claws which 
lay hold of the bark... . .” 
Again—“ Look here at a fresh wonder. Away, in 
front of us, a smooth grey pillar glistens on high. You 
can see neither the top nor the bottom of it. But its 
colour and its perfectly cylindrical shape tell you what it 
is—a glorious palmiste, one of those queens of the forest 
which you saw standing in the fields, with its capital 
buried in the green cloud, and its base buried in 
that bank of green velvet plumes, which you must 
skirt carefully round, for they are a dwarf prickly palm, 
called here Black Roseau. Close to it rises another pillar, 
as straight and smooth, but one-fourth of the diameter, a 
giant’s walking cane. Its head, too, is in the green cloud. 
But near are two or three younger ones, only forty or fifty 
feet high, and you see their delicate feather heads, and are 
told that they are Manacques (Euterpe oleracea), the 
slender nymphs which attend upon the forest queen, as 
beautiful, though not as grand, as she.” 
The wonderful flowers, the strange creepers and fantastic 
jungle ropes, the buttress trees, the orchids, and a hundred 
other characteristic tropical forms, are described in equally 
picturesque language, A giant Hura tree, forty-four feet in 
girth, and 192 feet high, is the occasion for some remarks 
on Darwinism. For this is a euphorbiaceous tree, and 
allied, therefore, to our humble spurges, as well as to the 
manioc, the castor-oil plant, the crotons, the scarlet poin- 
settia, and many other distinct forms. 
“But what if all these forms are the descendants of one 
original form? Would that be one whit more wonderful, 
