Come away; for I wish you to look at this _Encephalalartos_. A horrid plant it is, a sort of caricature of the elegant Palms, somewhat as if a founder had essayed a cocoa-nut tree in cast iron. Out of the thick, rough, stiff stem spring a dozen of arching fronds, beset with sharp, sword-shaped leaflets, but having the rigidity of horn, of a greyish hue, all harsh and repulsive to excess. In the midst of this rigid coronal sits the fruit, like an immense pine-cone. The swelling column that constitutes the stem is but a mass of pith, surrounded by a thin case of wood, and enclosed by the remains of former leaves. The whole surface is covered with the lozenge-shaped scars of these, in vast number. Thousands of these there must be in this trunk of eight feet high, and a foot thick. The leaves of the existing crown are few and very durable, so that it would be no unreasonable conjecture to suppose that this great Cycadaceous plant is seven or eight centuries old. [Illustration: ENCEPHALARTOS.] Nay, for this also has been created even now! What shall we say to _this_ singular phenomenon? Observe yonder gigantic Fig (_Ficus Australis_) growing out of the face of that vast rocky precipice. It is not so much to the massive grandeur of the trunk, nor to the widespread head of dense foliage, that I call your attention, as to the broad expanse of roots, from the thickness of your body to that of your little finger, which have crossed and interlaced and separated and re-united, in all imaginable ways, until the whole forms a great flat network of wood, investing the surface of the rock, and following all its projections and angles with singular faithfulness, for a space of many square yards. Would you not say, admitting that the Figs are rapid growers, that many years must have elapsed since the minute seed was dropped in yonder crevice, by some vagrant parrot that wiped his beak after breakfast on the point of rock? Would you not say that many years must have passed from the time when the tiny shoot peeped from the rocky chink, to the present moment, when the leafy honours of the crown above and the woody wall of the roots below combine to repay the protection which the plant in infancy received from its stony foster mother? Of course you would; and most truly too, did you not know that the Fig-tree is now rejoicing in the first hour of its new-created being.