6 



Rubber, Fiais elastica. Other species are completely leafless. 

 Many species bloom just at the end of the dry season, so that 

 the display of flowers was particularly brilliant just at the time 

 of our visit. The huge Bombax trees along the roadside, com- 

 pletely bare otherwise, have great crimson flowers on the 

 branches, the Stereospermums are similarly covered with white 

 flowers, and so for many other species. The garden paths are 

 frequently strewn with red or white or yellow flowers, dropped 

 from some tall tree above. 



The number of flowers on some of the trees is almost incredible. 

 There was an average of 25 flowers per square inch under a 

 large tree of Terminalia helerica, covering a space of fifty feet 

 in diameter, and amounting to certainly five million flowers 

 already fallen, to say nothing of those still on the tree. After 

 every breeze the air was filled with them as with yellow snow 

 flakes. 



It is not necessary to describe in detail the brilliancy of the 

 floral display in the garden, because it is not characteristic of 

 the tropics. Selective planting has emphasized it in the garden, 

 and produced a riot of color, in which scarlet and crimson 

 predominate. Two genera only need be mentioned. 



Several species of Brownea are planted, producing their scarlet 

 or orange flowers in spherical clusters as much as six inches in 

 diameter, and composed of hundreds of flowers. Amherstia 

 nobilis produces its flowers in pendent racemes a yard long. The 

 rachis and pedicels are crimson. On each pedicel are two 

 crimson bracts, each three inches long, and beyond the bracts is 

 a crimson flower with crimson stamens, each petal three inches 

 long. When a hundred or more or these racemes are blooming 

 on a tree the size of an American cherry, the result is remarkably 

 vivid. 



Throughout the whole of March and the first few days of 

 April the same weather continued, continuous sunshine, except 

 for the occasional shade from a light fleecy cloud, and a dry 

 piercing heat that seemed to grow more intense every day, until 

 the climax came on April 4. At noon on that day the heat was 

 oppressive. The mountains on the horizon seemed to quiver 



