l. Two feet? One has heard often enough of bison-hunting
in Himalayan forests among Deodaras one hundred and fifty feet high, and
scarlet rhododendrons thirty feet high, growing in fifteen or twenty
feet of leaf- and timber-mould. And here, in a forest equally ancient,
every plant is growing out of the bare yellow loam as it might in a
well-hoed garden-bed. Is it not strange?

Most strange, till you remember where you are,--in one of Nature's
hottest and dampest laboratories. Nearly eighty inches of yearly rain
and more than eighty degrees of perpetual heat make swift work with
vegetable fibre, which, in our cold and sluggard clime, would curdle
into leaf-mould, perhaps into peat. Far to the north, in poor old
Ireland, and far to the south, in Patagonia, begin the zones of peat,
where dead vegetable fibre, its treasures of light and heat locked up,
lies all but useless age after age. But this is the zone of illimitable
sun force, which destroys as swiftly as it generates, and generates
again as swiftly as it destroys. Here, when the forest giant falls, as
some tell me that they have heard him fall, on silent nights, when the
cracking of the roots below and the lianes aloft rattles like musketry
through the woods, till the great trunk comes down, with a boom as of a
heavy gun, re-echoing on from mountain-side to mountain-side; then

"Nothing in him that doth fade,
But doth suffer an _air_-change
Into something rich and strange."

Under the genial rain and genial heat, the timber-tree itself, all its
tangled ruin of lianes and parasites, and the boughs and leaves, snapped
off not only by the blow, but by the very wind of the falling tree, all
melt away swiftly and peacefully in a few months--say almost a few
days--into the water, and carbonic acid, and sunlight out of which
they were created at first, to be absorbed instantly by the green
leaves around, and, transmuted into fresh forms of beauty, leave not
a wrack behind. Explained thus,--and this I believe to be the true
explanation,--the absence of leaf-mould is one of the grandest, as it
is one of the most startling, phenomena of the forest.

[And thus the writer rambles on, telling fresh marvels of the
tropic woods, from which a knowledge is attained that "defies
all analysis."]

[It is that of] the causes and effects of their beauty; that "aesthetic"
of plants, of which Schleiden has spoken so well in that charming book
of his, "Th