Notes on Plants at Roraima. 151 
Very different and distinct flora characterize the parts 
of Guiana thus variously conditioned ; though, naturally, 
a certain number of species are common to all three. 
Where the narrow sea-washed strip has been artifi- 
cially disforested, a generally dwarf and weed-like flora, 
very largely consisting of non-indigenous plants, pre- 
vails. 
Within the forest, perhaps the most noteworthy fea- 
tures of the vegetation after the generally great height 
of the trees and, often, the abundance of palms, are, in 
the first place, the great scarcity of mosses, herbage and 
low-growing plants, especially of any such with con- 
spicuous flowers, and the consequent bareness of the 
soil, which is relieved by only a few scattered ferns, 
ginger-worts, caladiums and other aroids, dieffenbachias, 
cyperaceae and other such shade-loving plants, and, in 
the next place, though this is hardly discernible from 
below, the abundance of the flowering creepers and 
epithytes spread over the matted tops of the densely 
placed, lofty trees. The representatives of the low- 
growing bright flowering plants of the thinner, lighter, 
woods of temperate climates have here, in this dense 
shade of the tropical forest, to send their immensely long 
flowerless creeping stems up some one or even two hun- 
dred feet, to reach above the highest tree-branches, before 
they can break into bloom. Only as semi-aquatics along 
the riverside are there a few showy flowered dwarf plants. 
Quite different again is it on the savannah, where, 
among the grasses which, of course, form the chief vege- 
tation, are scattered a considerable number of bright 
flowered dwarf plants, — though even here the abundance 
of bloom very rarely reaches the extraordinary develop- 
