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CLIMATE AND NATURAL HISTORY. 991 
It seems to be hardly realized how wintry is the aspect 
of the dry season in the tropics. Many more of the trees 
in Africa are deciduous than we often imagine in our 
conjured-up mental visions of a fair tropic land, where 
perpetual verdure reigns, and the vegetation is a vague, 
indefinite mixture of limp palms, with fronds like ostrich- 
feathers, and rampant bananas raising their florid greenery 
above the masses of formless creepers. But nevertheless, 
when about a month has elapsed after the last rains are 
over, the aspect of an African hill-side has much of the 
cheerless desolation of winter aboutit. The once imposing 
baobabs, whose masses of verdure were fair to see, are 
reduced to mazes of leafless twigs; the ground is covered 
with a brown carpet of fallen leaves; many trees, though 
retaining their foliage, put forth no fresh shoots, and are 
yellow and seared with the hot sun; here and there an 
evergreen stands out, like an Enolish yew or holly, in 
almost heartless contrast of dark cold ereen amid its 
faded, withered fellows, and next to it, perhaps, is a white 
skeleton of what was a short time since a tufted tree. 
The tall herbs, erewhile gay with gorgeous flowers, show 
now nothing but yellow stalks and shrivelled seed-vessels, 
in-which perhaps there still lurks a point of colour in the 
red or orange seeds that gleam from under the brown 
husk. The many tiny flowerets, the mosses and fungi, 
are scarce to find ; only certain repulsive plants—things 
with fleshy, mutilated limbs, weirdly swollen, distorted and 
covered with malicious prickles—stand forth in disagree- 
able prominence, screened from view no longer by the fair 
and delicate creeping ferns and clambering lycopodiums, 
and seeming to stand unchanged and prosperous when all 
else fades and dies. In the great meadows through which 
the path meanders the waving grasses are laid low, and in 
their place are dismal tracts of black ashes where the 
bush fires have just swept by. 
But the dry season is hardly death as much as recupera- 
tion. It is a short pause—a sleep in which the expended 
forces of Nature are once more gathered in. Just as the . 
earth in its summer solstice spins out from the sun’s 
