13 
THE GHOSTS OF THE TROPICAL 
FOREST. 
Perhaps the rarest, certainly the least known to 
man of all the creatures which, by a strange chance, 
find their way to the Gardens of the Zoological 
Society in Regent’s Park, are the denizens of the 
Tropical Forest. We say forest, because, though 
divided by the dissociable ocean, there is only one 
great forest which belts the globe. The notion of the 
physical symmetry of the world, which fascinated the 
old geographers, and led Herodotus to surmise that 
the course of the great river of Africa must of neces- 
sity conform in the main to that of the Danube in the 
opposite continent, was wrong in theory and appli- 
cation. But shifting the guiding forces from the 
control of original and plastic design to the influence 
of the dominant Sun, the theory still holds good ; and 
while the tropical heats remain constant and undis- 
turbed, so must the tropical forest flourish and endure, 
with its inseparable concomitants of vegetable growth 
overpowering and replacing the marvellous rapidity of 
vegetable decay. 
