Every one who has wandered in a primeval forest of the tropics, whether in the eastern or the western hemisphere, has been struck by the inconceivable profusion of the climbers and twiners with which the trees are laced together. They are found from the thickness of a warship's cable to that of pack-thread; the stronger ones often uncouthly twisted together, and binding tree to tree. They are of the orders _Malpighaceæ_, _Apocyaneæ_, _Asclepiadeæ_, _Bignoniaceæ_, &c., and often are adorned with the most brilliant flowers. I have before cited descriptions of these wonderful lianes, as they occur in the forests of South America; my readers may like to peruse Sir Emerson Tennent's graphic sketch of those of Ceylon:-- "It is the trees of older and loftier growth that exhibit the rank luxuriance of these wonderful epiphytes in the most striking manner. They are tormented by climbing plants of such extraordinary dimensions that many of them exceed in diameter the girth of a man; and these gigantic appendages are to be seen surmounting the tallest trees in the forest, grasping their stems in firm convolutions, and then flinging their monstrous tendrils over the larger limbs till they reach the top, whence they descend to the ground in huge festoons, and, after including another and another tree in their successive toils, they once more ascend to the summit, and wind the whole into a maze of living network as massy as if formed by the cable of a line-of-battle ship. When, by and by, the trees on which this singular fabric has become suspended give way under its weight, or sink by their own decay, the fallen trunk speedily disappears, while the convolutions of climbers continue to grow on, exhibiting one of the most marvellous and peculiar living mounds of confusion that it is possible to fancy. Frequently one of these creepers may be seen holding by one extremity the summit of a tall tree, and grasping with the other an object at some distance near the earth, between which it is strained as tight and straight as if hauled over a block. In all probability the young tendril had been originally fixed in this position by the wind, and retained in it till it had gained its maturity, where it has the appearance of having been artificially arranged as if to support a falling tree."[229]