THE VEGETABLE KINGDOM. 527 



But it is particularly in the dicot3rledonous plants that 

 longevity is so extraordinary. There are some which 

 grow so slowly that ages seem scarcely to alter their 

 dimensions. 



Now if we look at vegetable life scattering its great 

 families here and there upon the globe, we find the same 

 contrasts — misery by the side of grandeur. The bare rock 

 Avhich extends its shattered masses upon the mountain 

 slope is only coloured with a crust of lichens and mosses, 

 Avhich dot its surface like so many pencil marks. 

 Below these regions, where the severity of the air destroys 

 everything, we find the pine and the oak twisted and 

 dwarfed, while lower down rise magnificent and sombre 

 forests of Coniferaj encircling the mountains with their 

 girdle of black. 



The palms compose numerous groups in all the equa- 

 torial regions. But vegetable life reveals itself peculiai-ly 

 with all its variety and splendour in the immense virgin 

 forests of the tropics, where the axe has never yet shorn 

 it of its exuberance. Some present such a profusion of 

 aged trees entwined with ferns and creepers, that they 

 are absolutely impenetrable, unless some stream of water 

 happen in its winding course to furnish the daring traveller 

 with a natural path. 



The special character of the vegetation in some of these 

 forests gives them quite a characteristic aspect. When 

 the parasitic orchises predominate, they form on every side 

 elegant chandeliers, as it were, of verdiu-e and flowers; or 

 they hang here and there in long slender pendants, looking 

 like so many gigantic spiders displaying their mighty 

 claws and balancing themselves now and then at the end 

 of their threads. 



Again, as in New Zealand, arborescent ferns, with the 



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