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parA 



tends to fix itself, and the wood of its stem grows by 

 spreading itself like a plastic mould over one side of the 

 trunk of its supporter. It then puts forth, from each 

 side, an arm-like branch, which grows rapidly, and looks 

 as though a stream of sap were flowing and hardening as 

 it went. This adheres closely to the trunk of the victim 

 and the two arms meet on the opposite side and blend 

 together. These arms are put forth at somewhat regular 

 intervals in mounting upwards, and the victim, when 

 its strangler is full-grown, becomes tightly clasped by a 

 number of inflexible rings. These rings gradually grow 

 larger as the Murderer flourishes, rearing its cfown of 

 foliage to the sky mingled with that of its neighbour, 

 and in course of time they kill it by stopping the flow of 

 its sap. The strange spectacle then remains of the selfish 

 parasite clasping in its arms the lifeless and decaying 

 body of its victim, which had been a help to its own 

 growth. Its ends have been served — it has flowered and 

 fruited, reproduced and disseminated its kind ; and now, 

 when the dead trunk moulders away, its own end ap- 

 proaches ; its support is gone, and itself also falls. 



The Murderer Sipo merely exhibits, in a more con 

 spicuous manner than usual, the struggle which neces- 

 sarily exists amongst vegetable forms in these crowded 

 forests, where individual is competing with individual 

 and species with species, all striving to reach light and 

 air in order to unfold their leaves and perfect their organs 

 of fructification. All species entail in their successful 

 struggles the injury or destruction of many of their 

 neighbours or supporters, but the process is not in others 

 so speaking to the eye as it is in the case of the Matador. 

 The efforts to spread their roots are as strenuous in some 

 plants and trees, as the struggle to mount upwards is 

 in others. From these apparent strivings result the 

 buttressed stems, the dangling air roots, and other similar 

 phenomena. The competition amongst organized beings 

 has been prominently brought forth in Darwin's ' Origin 

 of Species ; ' it is a fact which must be always kept in 

 view in studying these subjects. It exists everywhere, in 

 every zone, in both the animal and vegetable kingdoms. 

 It is doubtless most severe, on the whole, in tropical 

 countries, but its display in vegetable forms in the forest 

 is no exceptional phenomenon. It is only more con- 

 spicuously exhibited, owing perhaps to its affecting prin- 



