VAKIETY OF FORM. 
75 
scientific classification. The variety of colour is not less surprising 
than the variety of form — copper, pink, gray, brown, green, marbled 
with lichens, furred with mosses, and enriched with delicate creeping, 
lace-like ferns. " Up this stem," to quote once again from Kingsley, 
" scrambles a climbing seguine, with entire leaves ; up the next another, 
quite different, with deeply-cut leaves ; up the next the cerinman 
spreads its huge leaves, latticed and forked again and again. So fast 
do they grow, that they have not time to fill up the spaces between 
their nerves, and are consequently full of oval holes ; and so fast does 
its spadix of flowers expand, that an actual genial heat, and fire of 
passion, which may be tested by the thermometer, or even by the hand, 
is given off" during fructification. Beware of breaking it, or the seguines. 
They will probably give off" an evil smell, and as probably a blistering 
milk." The finely-cut fronds of the lygodium, a climbing fern, em- 
bellish the next stem ; and up the next the so-called " griffe-chatte " 
is crawling rapidly, with its cat-like claws. The vanilla orchis twines 
round another, and fills the air with its delicious fragrance ; and yet 
another is slowly dying in the close embrace of the matapalo, which 
has twisted itself about every branch, and is choking out its life. 
Lastly, we would draw attention to the variety of foliage. The 
glossy leaves of the mulatto wood (Bois Muldtre, or Pentaclethra fila- 
mentosa) are copper-coloured, like an African potentate. The large 
waving plumes of the cocorite palm, twenty and thirty feet long, are 
of a dark, dull green. And what is yonder spot of crimson flame, 
burning in the darkest recess of all, from an under bough of that low, 
weeping tree ? A flower-head of the brownea, or rosa del monte. 
Above it rises the bright straw-coloured brush, three feet long, with 
a brown hood of the same length, of a cocorite ; and above the cocorites 
dangle, among leaves of every shape, ovate, cordate, palmate, acu- 
minate, and the like — some fashioned like shields, others like hearts, 
others like eggs — the purple and yellow flowers of different kinds of 
lianas. " And through them," says Kingsley — it is our last quotation 
— " a carat palm, or sabal, has thrust its thin, bending stem, and 
spread out its flat head of fan-shaped leaves, twenty feet long each ; 
while over it hangs, eighty feet aloft, the head of the very tree upon 
