But it is to hot countries you must go to see plant crime flourishing unchecked, particularly the forests of Central America. An especially cruel sinner is one well known to us by name, the India-rubber tree. Its favorite plan seems to be to start growing on the very crown of some forest giant, such as a wild fig or a Guianese ceiba tree. There it pushes out its great, evergreen, leathery leaves, and digs its roots down into the fast-rotting substance of its host’s trunk. Soon its long, creeping rootlets descend along the outside bark of the supporting tree, and finally reach the ground. Soon nothing is left between them but a rotting shell. The murder is accomplished, and the garroter has usurped the place of its victim. That queer air plant known as Spanish moss kills many a fine forest tree with its solemn, gray tendrils. Like ivy, it robs its host of light and air and ends by slowly smothering its victim. Occasionally plants not burglars by nature are forced to assume that rôle. A young mountain ash may not infrequently be seen springing from the crown of an ancient oak or other tree. The seed has been dropped there by a bird and taken root. Ferns, too, often grow in great profusion on the long, horizontal boughs of oaks over rivers and ponds. Their weight, and the moss they encourage among their roots, end by rotting their support. More rarely a tree may actually be watched stealing its own juices. Willows, when old, are apt to become hollow, and they rot till nothing but a shell of bark is left. If this is cut, delicate rootlets will descend from the upper portion of the cut and suck nourishment from the decaying remains of the tree itself. TERRIBLE FATES POSSIBLE. Astronomers tell us that the day must come when this earth will, like the moon, wheel through the heavens a dead and barren ball of matter--airless, waterless, lifeless. But long, long before that time man will be extinct, will have disappeared so utterly that not so much as the bleached skeleton of a human being will be visible on all the millions of square miles of the surface of this planet. Unless by some huge and universal cataclysm the whole race is swept at once into eternity, it is but reasonable to suppose that man, like any other race of animals, will disappear slowly, and that eventually there will be but a single human being left--some old, old man, grayheaded and bearded, and left to wander alone in a solitude that may be imagined, but not described. How will he die, this last relic of the teeming millions that once transformed the face of the globe and ruled undisputed masters of every other living thing? There are many fates that may befall him. He may go mad with the horror of loneliness, and himself end his own miserable existence. He may be eaten by the vast reptiles or giant insects which will then probably infest the solitudes.