inflexible rings. These rings gradually grow larger as the murderer flourishes, rearing its crown of foliage to the sky mingled with that of its neighbor, and in course of time they kill it by stopping the flow of its sap. The strange spectacle then remains of the selfish parasite clasping in its arms the lifeless and decaying body of its victim, which had been a help to its own growth. Its ends have been served--it has flowered and fruited, reproduced and disseminated its kind; and now when the dead trunk moulders away, its own end approaches; its support is gone, and itself also falls." The strangling properties of some of the fig-tree family are indeed very remarkable, and may be witnessed not only in South America, but in India, Ceylon, and Australia. Frazer observed several kinds of _Ficus_, more than 150 feet high, embracing huge ironbark trees in the forests at Moreton Bay. The _Ficus repens_, according to Sir Emerson Tennent, is often to be seen clambering over rocks, like ivy, turning through heaps of stones, or ascending some tall tree to the height of thirty or forty feet, while the thickness of its own stem does not exceed a quarter of an inch. The small plants of this family, of which the Murdering Liana is one species, grow and reproduce their kind from seeds {183} deposited in the ground; but the huge representatives of the family, such as the banyan-tree, whose "Bended twigs take root, and daughters grow About the mother tree;" and the Peepul, or sacred Bo-tree of the Buddhists (_Ficus religiosa_), originate from seeds carried by birds to upper portions of some palm or other tree. Fig-trees, as Sir E. Tennent has remarked, are "the Thugs of the vegetable world; for, though not necessarily epiphytic, it may be said that, in point of fact, no single plant comes to perfection or acquires even partial development without the destruction of some other on which to fix itself as its supporter." The mode of growth of these trees is well described by the excellent writer just mentioned, and we shall make use of his own language: