29 



lakes become covered with vegetation which resembles a meadow 

 at a distance. This swamp flora includes floating and herbaceous 

 aquatics and shrubby thickets like chaparral. Trees occur with 

 roots nearly exposed during the dry season. 



The swamp flora includes many trees of the Rubia family, with 

 valuable wood ; a profusion of shrubby Lantana and Eupatoriiim ; 

 various vines, as the Seciiridaca of the Polygala family ; herbs, as 

 Jnssiaca of the Onagraceae, etc. 



4. A tidal flora extends some forty miles in breadth along the 

 coast, with villages built on piles. The littoral flora at the ocean 

 edge is soon replaced by an inland tidal flora, largely of stout 

 fan-leaved palms, of different species from the short spiny palms 

 of the river margins or the tall smooth palms of the hills. 



Dr. Rusby found but few orchids ; two exhibited were a 

 beautiful Ionopsis and a Habenaria of curious floating habit, grow- 

 ing over deep water. One of the palms occurring there is re- 

 markable for its elevated base, raised about four feet by means of 

 spiny outward stilts (roots ?), its smooth trunk rising upward 

 about forty feet. 



In answer to inquiries, Dr. Rusby said that his collections were 

 made during six weeks beginning in April ; that though he found 

 many flowers, he concluded that flowering and seed production 

 at any time is comparatively the exception in the tropics, nature 

 relying chiefly on the continuance of plants by vegetative proc- 

 esses. Much of the country visited was uninhabited ; the Imataca 

 mountains, about twenty-five miles distant, had never, it would 

 seem, been visited by the Indians of the region. Dr. Rusby at- 

 tempted to reach them, but in vain, making but nine miles in 

 three weeks. 



Two members of the party afterwards reached these mountains, 

 and were rewarded by the discovery of a "lace-work fall " hun- 

 dreds of feet in height but falling from inaccessible cliffs. 



The evening's program closed with the exhibition' by Dr. 

 Underwood of a sterile mycelium of a fungus of the nature of 

 a Polyporus, growing recently beneath the new North German 

 Lloyd docks. Edward S. Burgess, 



Secretary. 



