Sir E. Im Thurn bears out Wallace’s view with some qualification: “At no time is the Guiana leafage as splendid as in an ordinary English wood either in the early spring or in the glorious golden autumn time. But on the other hand, the tropical forest throughout the year is more variously coloured … due partly to the fact that without special season for the bursting or the fall of the leaves, throughout the year it has trees both putting out new leaves, white, or brilliantly tinted with green, pink, or red, and others from which drop leaves with red, yellow, and bronze colours burned deeply into them by the blazing sun; and partly to the fact that in it trees of innumerable kinds, each with foliage slightly distinct in colour, grow intermingled.… The whole amount of colour afforded by flowers is probably not very different in tropical and in temperate trees, but is differently distributed.” But, to be fair to the tropical woods, so often drowned in the exuberance of their own greenery, it should be remembered how river banks and other open edges may show bright with hanging clusters of bloom and radiant festoons climbing to the tree-tops, while the ground, parched and swamped by turns, will lack that carpet of sweet and humble flowers, springing among soft turf, that is the special charm of an English spring. “What can they know of England who only England know,” seems at present the favourite tag of imperially minded journalists. It might be more truly said that only they who know the world know how much England has to be thankful for in the climate we are so ready to abuse. Their eyes are opened to see how Nature in our island has all the loveliest tints on her palette, to paint ever-changing pictures that owe their chief charm to the supposed defect of uncertainty, even as your Didos and Cleopatras--_varium et mutabile_--would less surely enchant in the form of stereotyped models of the most admired virtues. [Illustration: WILD FLOWERS IN THE BEECH WOODS]