ough
under the Equator, covered with perpetual snows. Noble rivers, whose
course, in several instances, exceeds three thousand miles.

Here are found the palm-tree, the cedar, the tamarind, the guaiacum,
the sassafras, the hickory, the chestnut, the walnut of many different
kinds, the wild cherry (sometimes a hundred feet high), and more than
fifty different sorts of oak.

The plane, of which there are two kinds, one found in Asia, which is
called the oriental plane: that found in America is called the
occidental plane; but the Americans call it button-wood, or sycamore.
Its foliage is richer, and its leaves of a more beautiful green than the
oriental. It grows to a great size.

The cypress is perhaps the largest of the American trees; it is a more
than a hundred and twenty feet high; and the diameter of the trunk at
forty or fifty feet from the ground is sometimes eight or ten feet.

Another tree of gigantic magnitude is the wild cotton or Cuba tree. A
canoe made from the single trunk of this tree has been know to contain a
hundred persons.

Above all these in beauty is the majestic magnolia which shoots up to
the height of more than a hundred feet; its trunk perfectly straight,
surmounted by a thick expanded head of pale green foliage, in the form
of a cone.

From the centre of the flowery crown which terminates each of its
branches, a flower of the purest white arises, having the form of a
rose, from six to nine inches in diameter.

To the flower succeeds a crimson cone; this, in opening, exhibits round
seeds of the finest coral red, surrounded by delicate threads, six
inches long.

Here, every plant and tree displays its most majestic form.

Upon the shady banks of the Madelina there grows a climbing plant which
the botanists call Aristolochia, the flowers of which are four feet in
circumference, and children amuse themselves with covering their heads
with them as hats.

The Banana which grows in all the hot parts of America, and furnishes
the Indians with the chief part of their daily food, producing more
nutritious substance, in less space, and with less trouble than any
other known plant.

[Illustration]

It is here that the ground produces the sugar-cane, the coffee, and the
cocoa-nut from which is produced the chocolate. The vanilla, the anana
or pine apple, and many other delicious fruits.

The cacao, though generally pronounced cocoa, must not be confounded
with the Cocoa Palm which produces