FAZENDA LIFE. 



109 



but while the meal was making ready and a fire building 

 for the boiling of coffee, the stewing of chicken, rice, and 

 other creature comforts, we wandered at will in the wood. 

 This was the most beautiful, because the wildest and most 

 primitive, specimen of tropical forest we have yet seen. 

 I think no description prepares one for the difference 

 between this forest and our own, even though the latter 

 be the " forest primeval." It is not merely the difference 

 of the vegetation, but the impenetrability of the mass here 

 that makes the density, darkness, and solemnity of the 

 woods so impressive. It seems as if the mode of growth — 

 many of the trees shooting up to an immense height, but 

 branching only toward the top — were meant to give room 

 to the legion of parasites, sipos, lianas, and climbing plants 

 of all kinds which fill the intervening spaces. There is one 

 fact which makes the study of the tropical forest as inter- 

 esting to the geologist as to the botanist, namely, its rela- 

 tion to the vegetable world of past ages hidden in the 

 rocks. The tree-ferns, the Chamserops, the Pandanus, the 

 Araucarias, are all modern representatives of past types, 

 and this walk in the forest was an important one to Mr. 

 Agassiz, because he made out one of those laws of growth 

 which unite the past and the present. The Chamserops is a 

 palm belonging to the ancient vegetable world, but having 

 its representatives in our days'. The modern Chamaerops, 

 with its fan-like leaves spreading on one level, stands struc- 

 turally lower than the Palms with pinnate leaves, which 

 belong almost exclusively to our geological age, and have 

 numerous leaflets arranged along either side of a central 

 axis. The young Palms were exceedingly numerous, spring- 

 ing up at every step upon our path, some of them not more 

 than two inches high, while their elders towered fifty feet 



