220 
BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA 
the tree ferns on the mountains and the many beautiful ferns to be found in 
moist places. The Osmunda grows luxuriantly in the stream valleys, and there 
are many varieties of maiden-hair. The dear familiar bracken appears directly 
an altitude of 3000 feet is reached, and flourishes thence up to 6000 feet; in 
company with it grows the blackberry bramble, and the two together gladden 
the exile’s heart like emissaries 
from home. 
There are many noble forest 
trees to be signalised for their 
beauty of outline and foliage. 
There are the Parinariums, 
! which tower up a hundred feet 
1 I into the air; the velvet-foliaged 
faB imy l 1 Albizzia; the Ebony (Diospyros ); 
the Khaya ( K. senegalensis ); the 
Pterocarpus, with its glorious fort¬ 
night of efflorescence, when the 
whole tree is a mass of large 
yellow flowers, and exhales an 
intoxicating odour of honey, at¬ 
tracting thereby thousands of 
bees ; and glossy-leaved fig trees 
of the genus Ficus} These hand¬ 
some forest trees, however, are 
generally restricted to the banks 
of rivers or the shores of lakes, 
or else to moist mountain slopes. 
The bulk of the country is covered 
by a forest of thin and poor type— 
chiefly Trachylobiums and Copai- 
feras, Hymenocardias, Anonas 
and Misuko (Uapaca kirkiana ), 
besides certain vines of large size 
growing in the habit of a shrub, 
and acacias which are of various 
forms and very little foliage. 
Some of these acacia trees are 
more clothed when they grow 
near water, and the scent of 
their flowers is delightful; but in the form of bushes they are intolerable. 
Were it not that the uniform pale green of the trunks and branches of the 
better developed acacias and their feathery light-green foliage and orange- 
coloured flowerets class them as beautiful, I should have been inclined to put 
them in the division of the vicious. 
There is malicious vegetation in Africa. There is a small plant—a kind of 
asafoetida—which gives forth the most noxious smell of bad drains when it 
is trampled on. There are various kinds of arums that give out a sickening 
odour; an euphorbia which, when broken, spurts out a poisonous milk, one 
1 These are especially beautiful at the north end of Lake Nyasa where they are grown by the natives 
for the sake of the shade they give. Their branches have long brown rootlets which gradually reach 
to the ground where they make independent growth, as is done by the Banyan tree in India. 
THE MUCUNA BEAN 
