ASPECT. 



147 



of tangled mangrove jungle exposes during the 

 ebb a sheet of black and sticky mire, into which 

 man sinks knee-deep. The regularity of the out- 

 line is broken by low projecting spits and by 

 lagoons and backwaters, which bite deep into the 

 land. Their pestilential, fatal exhalations veil 

 the low grounds with a perpetual haze, and the 

 excess of carbon is favourable to vegetable as it 

 is deleterious to animal life. 



Passing over the modern sea-beach, with its 

 coarse grasses, creepers, and wild flowers — mostly 

 the Ipomaea — and backed by towering trees, 

 cocoas, mangos, and figs, we often observe in 

 the interior distinct traces of an old elevation, 

 marked by lines of water-worn pebbles and by 

 coarse gravels overlying greasy blue clay. This 

 is the home of the copal. Beyond it the land rises 

 imperceptibly, and breaks into curves, swells, 

 and small ravines, rain-cut and bush-grown, 

 sometimes 40 feet deep. The soil is now a re- 

 tentive red or yellow argile, based upon a detritus 

 of coralline, hardened, where pressed, into the 

 semblance of limestone, or upon a friable sand- 

 stone-grit of quartz and silex. The humus 

 of the richest vegetable substance, and excited 

 by the excess of humidity and heat, produces in 

 abundance maize, millet, and various panicums ; 



