II 
EQUATORIAL VEGETATION 
265 
generally have showy flowers, for it is doubtful whether the 
proportion is at all greater in tropical than in temperate 
zones. On such natural exposures as steep mountain sides, 
the banks of rivers, or ledges of precipices, and on the 
margins of such artificial openings as roads and forest clear- 
ings, whatever floral beauty is to be found in the more 
luxuriant parts of the tropics is exhibited. But even in such 
favourable situations it is not the abundance and beauty of 
the flowers but the luxuriance and the freshness of the foliage, 
and the grace and infinite variety of the forms of vegetation, 
that will most attract the attention and extort the admiration 
of the traveller. Occasionally indeed you will come upon 
shrubs gay with blossoms or trees festooned with flowering 
creepers ; but, on the other hand, you may travel for a 
hundred miles and see nothing but the varied greens of the 
forest foliage and the deep gloom of its tangled recesses. In 
Mr. Belt’s Naturalist in Nicaragua , he thus describes the 
great virgin forests of that country which, being in a mount- 
ainous region and on the margin of the equatorial zone, are 
among the most favourable examples. “ On each side of the 
road great trees towered up, carrying their crowns out of 
sight amongst a canopy of foliage, and with lianas hanging 
from nearly every bough, and passing from tree to tree, 
entangling the giants in a great network of coiling cables. 
Sometimes a tree appears covered with beautiful flowers 
which do not belong to it but to one of the lianas that twines 
through its branches and sends down great rope-like stems to 
the ground. Climbing ferns and vanilla cling to the trunks, 
and a thousand epiphytes perch themselves on the branches. 
Amongst these are large arums that send down long aerial 
roots, tough and strong, and universally used instead of 
cordage by the natives. Amongst the undergrowth several 
small species of palms, varying in height from two to fifteen 
feet, are common ; and now and then magnificent tree ferns 
sending off their feathery crowns twenty feet from the ground 
delight the sight by their graceful elegance. Great broad- 
leaved heliconias, leathery melastomm, and succulent-stemmed, 
lop-sided, leaved, and flesh-coloured begonias are abundant, 
and typical of tropical American forests ; but not less so are 
the cecropia trees, with their white stems and large palmated 
