lianes, that many trees crash down under the strain long before their time. Perhaps no sight of the rain forest so convinces one of the struggle for light as to see one of these forest monarchs come crashing down loaded with thousands of plants that have been using it for support, and to escape which it has pushed its canopy to the utmost limits of its growth. Such contests are common in a forest of which only the barest outlines can be conveyed to those who have never seen it. To those who have had that good fortune any description palls beside the wonderful actuality. It is scarcely to be wondered at that these steaming rain forests with their gloom, and, as they were once described, “all hung about with fever trees,” should be dreaded by many, and the subject of fabulous tales to the credulous. The almost incredible difficulty of getting through them, not to mention the savage animals that inhabit many of them, have not lessened the tendency to exaggerate about these great forests. But the truth about them is so far beyond belief, the strange plants that intrepid explorers have brought out of them so almost incredible, that it only excited a temporary wonderment when the largest flower in the world was discovered in such a forest in the Malayan Archipelago. Sir Stanford Raffles and Dr. Arnold, while exploring in Sumatra during the year 1818, discovered what was called “the greatest prodigy of the vegetable world,” and no flower since found equals its size. The plant, without stem or leaves, consists wholly of one gigantic flower about nine feet in circumference, and was subsequently called _Rafflesia Arnoldii_. It aroused a sensation in England which was not abated by knowledge of the fact that the flower is a parasite on the stems of certain tropical plants related to the grape. That such a huge flower should be the product of a parasitic mode of life is one more illustration of how this and related irregularities occur in widely separated families of plants, and under varying conditions. Relatives of it have since been found in India, some parasitic on roots, others, as in _Rafflesia Arnoldii_, on the stems of vines. The sticky seeds are in all probability carried from place to place on the hoofs of elephants, to which they have been known to cling. Only if they are deposited on a bruised or otherwise exposed tissue of their future host can they grow. These curious plants have been actually cultivated in the greatest tropical botanical garden in the world, at Buitenzorg, Java.