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Philippine Journal of Science 
1920 
and tobacco, interspersed with various trees and shrubs; long, 
irregular lines of bamboo ; hedges of madre cacao ; many groves 
of coconut trees ; and hillside and valley planted to bananas and 
abaca. Often a view across country suggests a distant forest, 
but on closer inspection the supposed forest proves to be merely 
planted fruit trees, bamboos, etc., scattered among cultivated 
fields. If his curiosity leads the traveler to a personal inves- 
tigation and closer view of the jungle near some of the smaller 
towns, he finds that he must keep to the beaten path. On each 
side of the trail the tangle of coarse grasses, tough vines, and stiff 
shrubs effectually bars progress. Even with the help of a bolo, 
cutting a new trail in the average jungle is slow work. 
There are real forests within easy reach from Manila, but 
comparatively few persons know where to look for them. The 
casual visitor then leaves the Islands with no adequate idea of 
their endemic vegetation. What is true here is doubtless true 
of other tropical countries visited by travelers that are not 
botanists, and thus has arisen the more or less prevalent, popular 
conception that the tropical vegetation is typically a jungle. 
Whitford says : 
In the more thickly settled portions of the Islands, and along well- 
traveled trails, practically all the original forests have disappeared, giving 
place to grass or second-growth forests. The second-growth forests are 
seen by the average traveler, and have conveyed the wholly wrong im- 
pression that the forests of the Philippines, and, it is believed, of the 
Tropics in general, are a densely overgrown mass of impenetrable jungle. 
Some visitors to the Islands have been interested in the many 
curious plants that can be seen even about Manila, while others 
are enthusiastic in their praises of Philippine fruits ; yet a large 
percentage of the species of plants found in and about Manila 
have been introduced. Few species yielding edible fruit are 
natives of the Philippine Islands, and not one is found among 
the more commonly cultivated fruit trees. 
Of the 1,007 species of plants recorded by Merrill for the 
vicinity of Manila, only 124 are endemic; 550 are indigenous — 
that is, native to the Archipelago or introduced by natural agen- 
cies ; while 457 have been purposely or inadvertently introduced 
by man. Of the introduced species more than half are now 
spontaneous and about 225 are rarely found except as cultivated 
plants. 
If we exclude the abaca plant {Musa textilis Nee) and the various trees 
yielding timbers, gums, and resins, a few palms, some bamboos, the rattans, 
” Bull. Philip. Bur. Forestry 10" (1911) 15. 
” Philip. Journ. Sci. § C 7 (1912) 152. 
