A small section along the lower side of the Gulf of Mexico, the northeastern edges of Cuba and Santo Domingo, nearly all of the region drained by the Orinoco and Amazon Rivers; in the Congo, Zanzibar, and Madagascar in Africa; all of southeastern Asia, including the East Indies and part of the north coast of Australia--these comprise the regions of the tropical rain forest. All of them have, besides continuous heat, a nearly continuous or in some places a periodic rainfall, averaging over, and usually much over, eighty-five inches a year, as compared with about half that near New York. There are, of course, other places in the world where these rain forests, so called from their abundant moisture and some of the effects of it, are found. But in the regions mentioned they are at once the most wonderful and to most white men the most awesome manifestations of the plant world. Such forests seem, and actually are, pulsating with life, as instruments stationed in them have many times proved. With some kinds of bamboo growing over two feet a day, and a eucalyptus tree in Java forty-five feet in three years--and these are not isolated cases--the tremendous annual increase in the amount of vegetation can be glimpsed. Of course not all the plants in them grow at any such rate, but the great heat and abundant moisture does make tropical rain forests irresistible in their power. Plantation owners, and railways that have been run through such forests, wage constant warfare against the recapture by the teeming forest of man’s intrusion of it. The writer once saw in Santo Domingo a railway cut through such a jungle and abandoned only two or three years before. Not a trace of the roadbed could be found, ties, rails, and switches all covered with a dense vegetation, and overhead the canopy of the forest had closed over the opening and was already sending down hundreds of adventitious roots that would complete the obliteration of man’s handiwork. Everywhere there is the evidence of vegetable life run riot, ever crowding and pushing to close up openings made by the crashing down of old trees or the artificial clearings of man. Those living on the edges of such forests speak and think of them as dim, mysterious places where strange creatures and the ever-present fevers join forces with the vegetation to keep out humankind. That they are places of actual danger everyone knows who recalls that Stanley’s trip through equatorial Africa cost one hundred and seventy lives, many of which were sacrificed to disease and strangely enough nine were lost through starvation. While the tropics supply much of the food used there, these jungles produce almost none of it and because of the scarcity of edible fruits, the extraordinary difficulty of getting about and collecting what does grow, starvation faces anyone who goes into them without adequate supplies.