BOILING LAKE OF DOMINICA. 55 
walls of which were almost perpendicular, where slip- 
pery roots and hanging lianes only, enabled us to 
accomplish the ascent. One portion of our route was 
through a bowl-shaped depression containing a few 
acres, in which seemed concentrated all the glorious 
vegetation indigenous to these tropical forests. Hun- 
dreds and thousands of plants of strange and beauti- 
ful shapes were massed together in prodigal confusion. 
Conspicuous among them was the grand tree-fern. 
Those who have seen in glass-house or garden of 
acclimatization, only, the stunted specimens of this 
plant, can form hardly a conception of the grandeur 
of these arborescent ferns in their native homes. They 
are rarely found in perfect development at a lesser al- 
titude than one thousand feet above the sea, and it is 
in the “ high-woods” belt alone that they attain their 
greatest height and perfect symmetry. They love 
cool and moist situations, revel in shade and delight 
in solitude. “If,” says Humboldt, “they descend to- 
ward the sea coast, it is only under cover of thick 
shade.” Ihave seen them in these mountains, in the 
vegetable zone most favorable for their growth — that 
between fifteen hundred and twenty-five hundred feet 
above the sea — of a height of thirty or thirty-five feet. 
Then, truly, were they impressive in their combination 
of delicately traced leaves and slender stems ; essential- 
ly children of the tropics. There is sublimity in their 
expression. There is a suggestiveness of a benedic- 
tion in those lace-like leaves, which are spread above 
the head of the observer like outstretched hands, and 
which only move gently and tremulously, ever pulsat- 
ing to the slightest breath of air. The light that filters 
through the cocoa-palm leaves is wonderfully lambent 
