n the deciduous forests of the United
States fifteen or twenty years after the cutting of the original forest,
but here there is much more evidence of rapid growth. A few species of
bushes and trees may remain green throughout the year, but during the
dry season most of the jungle plants lose their leaves, at least in
part.

With every mile that one advances into the more rainy interior, the
jungle becomes greener and fresher, the density of the lower growths
increases, and the proportion of large trees becomes greater until
finally jungle gives place to genuine forest. There many of the trees
remain green throughout the year. They rise to heights of fifty or sixty
feet even on the borders of their province, and at the top form a canopy
so thick that the ground is shady most of the time. Even in the drier
part of the year when some of the leaves have fallen, the rays of the
sun scarcely reach the ground until nine or ten o'clock in the morning.
Even at high noon the sunlight straggles through only in small patches.
Long, sinuous lianas, often queerly braided, hang down from the trees;
epiphytes and various parasitic growths add their strange green and red
to the complex variety of vegetation. Young palms grow up almost in
a day and block a trail which was hewn out with much labor only a few
months before. Wherever the death of old trees forms an opening, a
thousand seedlings begin a fierce race to reach the light. Everywhere
the dominant note is intensely vigorous life, rapid growth, and quick
decay.

In their effect on man, the three forms of tropical forest are very
different. In the genuine rain forest agriculture is almost impossible.
Not only does the poor native find himself baffled in the face of
Nature, but the white man is equally at a loss. Many things combine to
produce this result. Chief among them are malaria and other tropical
diseases. When a few miles of railroad were being built through a
strip of tropical forest along the coast of eastern Guatemala, it was
impossible to keep the laborers more than twenty days at a time; indeed,
unless they were sent away at the end of three weeks, they were almost
sure to be stricken with virulent malarial fevers from which many died.
An equally potent enemy of agriculture is the vegetation itself. Imagine
the difficulty of cultivating a garden in a place where the weeds grow
all the time and where many of them reach a height of ten or twenty
feet in a single year. P