The original collectors of _Rafflesia Arnoldii_ could scarcely credit their senses when they saw for the first time this extraordinary plant, whose whole life is spent in producing this great flower and fruit. As one of them says: “Had I been alone, and had there been no witnesses, I think I should have been fearful of mentioning the dimensions of this flower, so much does it exceed every flower I have ever seen or heard of.” The odor of the flower is repulsive, and, with its great size and curious mode of growth in the dark rain forest, it is surely one of the strangest productions of the vegetable world. But as the utmost development of the plant world, and producing the greatest profusion and richness of plant life, these rain forests are, beyond the sporadic occurrence of such wonders as _Rafflesia_ and some others, places of extraordinary interest. With every inch of space occupied by plants, the very epiphytes often having on their leaves still smaller plants, we see here what nature will produce when the maximum conditions for plant growth are so nearly perfect. Theodore Roosevelt in his book, “Through the Brazilian Wilderness,” gives a vivid picture of the rain forest there, and it may well end our account of those most interesting of all plant societies: “In one grove the fig trees were killing the palms, just as in Africa they kill the sandalwood trees. In the gloom of this grove there were no flowers, no bushes; the air was heavy; the ground was brown with moldering leaves. Almost every palm was serving as a prop for a fig tree. The fig trees were in every stage of growth. The youngest ones merely ran up the palms as vines. In the next state the vine had thickened and was sending out shoots, wrapping the palm stem in a deadly hold. “Some of the shoots were thrown round the stem like the tentacles of an immense cuttlefish. Others looked like claws that were hooked into every crevice, and round every projection. In the stage beyond this the palm had been killed, and its dead carcass appeared between the big, winding vine trunks; and later the palm had disappeared and the vines had united in a great fig tree. Water stood in black pools at the foot of the murdered trees, and of the trees that had murdered them. There was something sinister and evil in the dark stillness of the grove; it seemed as if sentient beings had writhed themselves round and were strangling other sentient beings.” Many other forests in the tropics, where the rainfall is less, or less regularly distributed, are not unlike our own, having rather regular periods of leaf-fall that come with the dry season rather than with the autumn. The trees are of course never the same as ours, but the general aspect is not very different from that of temperate forests. TEMPERATE FORESTS IN AMERICA