There is also death from wounds, sickness, decay, hereditary disease and old age, and various accidents thinning the forest, removing the unfit, the weakly, the unadaptable, as among humanity. Let us suppose a tall chief among the giants, like an insolent son of Anak. By a head he lifts himself above his fellows--the monarch of all he surveys; but his pride attracts the lightning, and he becomes shivered to the roots, he topples, declines, and wounds half a dozen other trees in his fall. This is why we see so many tumorous excrescences, great goitrous swellings, and deformed trunks. The parasites again have frequently been outlived by the trees they had half strangled, and the deep marks of their forceful pressure may be traced up to the forks. Some have sickened by intense rivalry of other kinds, and have perished at an immature age; some have grown with a deep crook in their stems, by a prostrate log which had fallen and pressed them obliquely. Some have been injured by branches, fallen during a storm, and dwarfed untimely. Some have been gnawed by rodents, or have been sprained by elephants leaning on them to rub their prurient hides, and ants of all kinds have done infinite mischief. Some have been pecked at by birds, until we see ulcerous sores exuding great globules of gum, and frequently tall and short nomads have tried their axes, spears, and knives, on the trees, and hence we see that decay and death are busy here as with us. To complete the mental picture of this ruthless forest, the ground should be strewn thickly with half formed humus of rotting twigs, leaves, branches; every few yards there should be a prostrate giant, a reeking compost of rotten fibres, and departed generations of insects, and colonies of ants, half veiled with masses of vines and shrouded by the leafage of a multitude of baby saplings, lengthy briars and calamus in many fathom lengths, and every mile or so there should be muddy streams, stagnant creeks, and shallow pools, green with duckweed, leaves of lotus and lilies, and a greasy green scum composed of millions of finite growths. Then people this vast region of woods with numberless fragments of tribes, who are at war with each other and who live apart from ten to fifty miles in the midst of a prostrate forest, amongst whose ruins they have planted the plantain, banana, manioc, beans, tobacco, colocassia, gourds, melons, &c., and who, in order to make their villages inaccessible, have resorted to every means of defence suggested to wild men by the nature of their lives. They have planted skewers along their paths, and cunningly hidden them under an apparently stray leaf, or on the lee side of a log, by striding over which the naked foot is pierced, and the intruder is either killed from the poison smeared on the tops of the skewers, or lamed for months. They have piled up branches, and have formed abattis of great trees, and they lie in wait behind with sheaves of poisoned arrows, wooden spears hardened in