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often hanging from the topmost canopy to the ground, some 

 thin as a whip cord, others as thick as a man's body, are a fea- 

 ture of the rain-forest that inspires wonder, and actually they 

 enormoush- increase the difficulty of getting about. Some of 

 them of the family Clusiaceae and of the Genus Ficus are wrap- 

 ped about the trunks of trees, first in an ineffective rope-like 

 coil, but later in huge tendon-like growths that often strangle 

 their support. Trees in all stages of this strangulation are to be 

 found and sometimes the stranglers are themselves strangled by 

 a new comer. It is small wonder that such vegetatively deadly 

 propensities should have been extended into the idea that 

 lianes were man hunters. The legend still persists here in the 

 minds of those tuned to the miraculous. 



The lianes, the density of the forest, the tremendous amount 

 of moisture, the epiphytes, the insects and birds and monkeys 

 thatare everywhere, — the over-poweringsense of teeming life, — 

 these and the color and gloom of the jungle make of the Ama- 

 zonian forest a place quite marvellous enough, without the 

 horrors of the imaginative nature fakir,. The city of Para, 

 with quite extraordinary foresight, has captured a bit of that 

 life, preserved it nearly intact, so that the Bosque will always 

 be a place of peculiar interest to visitors. 

 Para, Brazil 

 January 6, 1929. 



