THE JOURNEY TO THE AMAZON 2S7 



British Museum of Natural History, and I am indebted to 

 Mr. C. Tate Regan, who has charge of this department, for 

 giving me the names of the species represented. In a paper 

 read before the Zoological Society in August, 1905, he states 

 that he has named about a hundred species, and that a large 

 portion of the remainder are probably new species, showing 

 how incomplete is our knowledge of the fishes of the Amazon 

 and its tributaries. 



Looking back over my four years' wanderings in the Ama- 

 zon valley, there seem to me to be three great features 

 which especially impressed me, and which fully equalled or 

 even surpassed my expectations of them. The first was the 

 virgin forest, everywhere grand, often beautiful and even sub- 

 lime. Its wonderful variety with a more general uniformity 

 never palled. Standing under one of its great buttressed 

 trees — itself a marvel of nature — and looking carefully 

 around, noting the various columnar trunks rising like lofty 

 pillars, one soon perceives that hardly two of these are alike. 

 The shape of the trunks, their colour and texture, the nature 

 of their bark, their mode of branching and the character of 

 the foliage far overhead, or of the fruits or flowers lying on 

 the ground, have an individuality which shows that they are 

 all distinct species differing from one another as our oak, elm, 

 beech, ash, lime, and sycamore differ. This extraordinary 

 variety of the species is a general though not universal 

 characteristic of tropical forests, but seems to be nowhere so 

 marked a feature as in the great forest regions which encircle 

 the globe for a few degrees on each side of the equator. An 

 equatorial forest is a kind of natural arboretum where speci- 

 mens of an immense number of species are brought together 

 by nature. The western half of the island of Java affords an 

 example of such a forest-region which has been well-explored, 

 botanically ; and although almost all the fertile plains have 

 been cleared for cultivation, and the forests cover only a 

 small proportion of the country, the number of distinct 

 species of forest-trees is said to be over fifteen hundred. 

 Now the whole island is only about as large as Ireland, and 



