cattered up and down, in all directions, through
the swamps, and hills, and savannas of _ci-devant_ Dutch Guiana.

On viewing the stately trees around him the naturalist will observe many
of them bearing leaves, and blossoms, and fruit, not their own.

The wild fig-tree, as large as a common English apple-tree, often rears
itself from one of the thick branches at the top of the mora; and when
its fruit is ripe, to it the birds resort for nourishment. It was to an
undigested seed, passing through the body of the bird which had perched
on the mora, that the fig-tree first owed its elevated station there.
The sap of the mora raised it into full bearing; but now, in its turn, it
is doomed to contribute a portion of its own sap and juices towards the
growth of different species of vines, the seeds of which, also, the birds
deposited on its branches. These soon vegetate, and bear fruit in great
quantities; so what with their usurpation of the resources of the
fig-tree, and the fig-tree of the mora, the mora, unable to support a
charge which nature never intended it should, languishes and dies under
its burden; and then the fig-tree, and its usurping progeny of vines,
receiving no more succour from their late foster-parent, droop and perish
in their turn.

A vine called the bush-rope by the wood-cutters, on account of its use in
hauling out the heaviest timber, has a singular appearance in the forests
of Demerara. Sometimes you see it nearly as thick as a man's body,
twisted like a cork-screw round the tallest trees, and rearing its head
high above their tops. At other times three or four of them, like
strands in a cable, join tree and tree and branch and branch together.
Others, descending from on high, take root as soon as their extremity
touches the ground, and appear like shrouds and stays supporting the
main-mast of a line-of-battle ship; while others, sending out parallel,
oblique, horizontal, and perpendicular shoots in all directions, put you
in mind of what travellers call a matted forest. Oftentimes a tree,
above a hundred feet high, uprooted by the whirlwind, is stopped in its
fall by these amazing cables of nature; and hence it is that you account
for the phenomenon of seeing trees not only vegetating, but sending forth
vigorous shoots, though far from their perpendicular, and their trunks
inclined to every degree from the meridian to the horizon.

Their heads remain firmly supported by the bush-rope; many o