er--The Samaritans of the jungle--The
forest and its history.

To speak of the forest without having seen it, and after having seen it,
to describe its marvellous beauties, are equally impossible tasks.

When Art shall have re-produced faithfully the magnificent harmonies of
colour, voice and outline peculiar to the jungle, it may be said that
there are no more secrets of beauty for it to penetrate, because nowhere
else has Nature been so profuse in bestowing her multifarious tints or
has manifested Life with such triumphal glory of fecundity; nowhere else
can be found such a prodigious variety of forms and attitudes or such
ineffable multiplicity of sounds.

Like a paean of love the forest breaks forth from the bosom of its
great Mother and rises eagerly, passionately towards the sun, its
Benefactor.

Were it possible to soar on high and look down upon that wide verdant
sea, its infinite gradations of green, enlivened here and there by the
audacious brightness of a thousand wondrous flowers, we should have
under our eyes the most complete, artistic and suggestive representation
of life and its struggles.

The gigantic trees shoot up straight towards the sun, each one seeming
to strive to outstrip the other; but a thick and even more ambitious
undergrowth of plants twine round their trunks and enclose them in a
tenacious embrace, then twisting, and creeping, amongst the spreading
boughs, reach and cover the highest tops where they at last unfold their
several leaves and flowers under the sun's most ardent gaze.

The tree, thus encircled and suffocated by the baneful hold of the
climbers, lacks light and breath; the sap flows in scarce quantities
throughout its organism and it languishes under the shade of the close
tendrils; swarms of insects increase its agony by making their food and
their nests of its bark; reptiles make love within the hollows of its
trunk and at last the day comes when the lifeless giant falls with a
frightful crash bearing with it the murderous parasite that is the
victim of its own tenacity, which first raised it to bask in the
sunshine and then caused it to be crushed under the rotten weight of its
former supporter.

These are furious embraces of envy and jealousy; phrenzies of egotism in
the vegetable kingdom: strange expressions of formidable hate and love,
of oppression and vengeance.

All these myriads of plants are invaded by the irrepressible mania to
ascend as high as possib