274 
That the effects of the rains were very great is evident even 
to the casual observer, who looks out from Cinchona over the 
surrounding country. Not only were scores of acres of coffee 
fields stripped to the bare rock but the native vegetation of 
large areas of the steep mountain sides was washed down into 
the valleys, and even the primeval forest of the valley bottoms 
was swept out and carried down to the sea. The south slopes 
of the Blue Mountains, eastward from Cinchona, are now marked 
examples will serve to clearly suggest the character and extent 
‘of the changes effected in the vegetation by the floods. 
In 1903 and in 1906, the writer had visited the valley of the 
eastern branch of the Green River, just below Whitfield Hall 
Coffee Works, to collect species of Piper and Peperomia then 
growing there in abundance, in a dense forest which covered the 
valley from its steep western slope across the bottom of the 
valley to the coffee lands on the hills to the east. In June, rgro, 
this whole valley was a gray desert of broken rock and pebbles, 
from a quarter to half a mile in width and stretching from the 
gray cliffs at its head down beyond the junction of this branch 
with the western one of the Green River. Not merely were 
the shrubs and herbs of the forest floor gone, but the great trees, 
with their covering of epiphytes and lianes had disappeared 
completely. Some of these plants perhaps lie buried in the old 
of the stream but most of them were evidently washed down 
to the Yallahs River, and on twenty miles to the sea. Scarcely 
a bit of driftwood is to be seen along the edges of the valley. 
Great boulders, eight or ten feet across, have disappeared, having 
either been buried or rolled farther down the valley. One huge 
rock, 20 feet high, at the junction of the east and west branches 
of the river, stands crowned with a large tree that clings to the 
boulder by roots wedged in its cracks, oo what the former 
level of the forest floor was at this point 
The only plants that have gained a arr in this stony waste. 
during the seven months following the flood, are scattered seed- 
lings of the John Crow Bush, Bocconia fruiescens L., and a few 
