264 ~ TROPICAL NATURE I 
perate and frigid zones. It is amid the scanty vegetation of 
the higher mountains and towards the limits of perpetual 
snow that the alpine flowers are most brilliant and conspicu- 
ous. Our own meadows and pastures and hillsides produce 
more gay flowers than our woods and forests ; and, in the 
tropics, it is in the parts where vegetation is less dense and 
luxuriant that flowers most abound. In the damp and 
uniform climate of the equatorial zone the mass of vegeta- 
tion is greater and more varied than in any other part of the 
globe, but in the great virgin forests themselves flowers are 
rarely seen. After describing the forests of the Lower 
Amazon, Mr. Bates asks: “But where were the flowers ? 
To our great disappointment we saw none, or only such as 
were insignificant in appearance. Orchids are rare in the 
dense forests of the lowlands, and I believe it is now tolerably 
well ascertained that the majority of the forest trees in 
equatorial Brazil have small and inconspicuous flowers.” 1! 
My friend Dr. Richard Spruce assured me that by far the 
greater part of the plants gathered by him in equatorial 
America had inconspicuous green or white flowers. My own 
observations in the Aru Islands for six months, and in Borneo 
for more than a year, while living almost wholly in the 
forests, are quite in accordance with this view. Conspicuous 
masses of showy flowers are so rare that weeks and months 
may be passed without observing a single flowering plant 
worthy of special admiration. Occasionally some tree or 
shrub will be seen covered with magnificent yellow or 
crimson or purple flowers, but it is usually an oasis of colour 
in a desert of verdure, and therefore hardly affects the 
general aspect of the vegetation. The equatorial forest is too 
gloomy for flowers or generally even for much foliage, except 
of ferns and other shade-loving plants ; and were it not that 
the forests are broken up by rivers and streams, by mountain 
ranges, by precipitous rocks and by deep ravines, there would 
be far fewer flowers visible than there are. Some of the 
great forest trees have showy blossoms, and when these are 
seen from an elevated point looking over an expanse of tree- 
tops the effect is very grand ; but nothing is more erroneous 
than the statement sometimes made that tropical forest trees 
1 The Naturalist on the River Amazons, 2d ed., p. 38. 
