VEGETATION OF A VALLEY, AND OUTSKIRTS OF FOREST. 31 



A Maranta (5 | 6 g), growing gregariously, abounds. Its bracts are of a dark 

 rose colour, and the flowers small and yellow. In company with it is often found 

 a highly characteristic plant, of which, unfortunately, I do not possess a repre- 

 sentation, but which I cannot pass over without mentioning. It is the Piper 

 methysticum, so frequently described, a perennial with large roundish leaves, from 

 the root of which a liquor, here called "Seka" and evidently of a religious import, 

 is prepared.* The background exhibits another characteristic feature of tropical 

 vegetation, viz. the outskirts of a wood as seen from without. Such outskirts are 

 generally formed by low trees and by shrubs, and show a greater variety of forms 

 than even the interior of the forest itself. Here in this island, so widely separated 

 from other countries, it is principally the gregariously growing Hibiscus populneus 

 which, chiefly constituting the underwood, combines with the dwarfish stems of a 

 new and very common Myristica (4 b) in forming the scaffolding for the impene- 

 trable curtain of creepers of which these outskirts chiefly consist. In the valleys of 

 the higher mountains this Myristica ( u iVu/m ") is generally a stately forest tree of 

 first magnitude ; here, as shown in our illustration, it is too much checked in growth 

 by a surrounding web of creepers, out of which it stretches its branches like arms, 

 to attain any considerable dimensions. The most elegant festoons formed by these 

 creepers are about this time decorated with the dark blue flowers of a Convolvulus 

 common about here, and forming a charming contrast with the pale yellow 

 ones of the Hibiscus populneus, closely resembling the mallows of our gardens. 

 Above this drapery towers a tree principally belonging to the outskirts, the widely 

 diffused Terminalia Catappa, or at least a species closely allied to it (6 b). Its 

 horizontal branches form distinctly marked stories around the erect stems, im- 

 parting to the tree, and by means of it to the landscape, a very peculiar feature. 

 We never found this characteristic growth better developed than in this island. 

 The leaves are of a dark green. (In Gruaham we saw them assume a red colour, 

 in consequence of the dry season.f) The top of a tree projecting on the right- 

 hand side of the background may perhaps belong to the same kind of Cordia of 

 which the stem is seen in our last view. A fine specimen of tree fern, in which 



* This beverage is termed Kava or Ava in most weights upon them. The foliage, at first dark 



islands of Eastern Polynesia ; in Fiji it is known as green, gradually becomes yellow, brown, and ulti- 



"Yaqona." — Berthold Seemann. mately scarlet, a change reminding us of that ob- 



f The branches of Terminalia Catappa may be served in so many North American plants, which 



more appropriately described as being distributed gives the woods of Canada and the United States 



in whorls, imparting to the tree a coniferous look. their great charm in the autumn. — Berthold See- 



The Fijians and other Southern Islanders aid the niann. 

 horizontal tendency of the branches by placing 



