And over them, and among them, what a strange variety of foliage. Look at the contrast between the Balisiers and that branch which has thrust itself among them, which you take for a dark, copper-colored fern, so finely divided are its glossy leaves. What a contrast again, the huge feathery fronds of the Cocorite palms which stretch right away hither over our heads, twenty and thirty feet in length. And what is that spot of crimson flame hanging in the darkest spot of all from an under bough of that low, weeping tree? A flower head of the Rosa del Monte. And what that bright, straw-colored fox’s brush above it, with a brown hood like that of an Arum, brush and hood nigh three feet long each? Look--for you require to look more than once, sometimes more than twice--here, up the stem of that Cocorite, or as much of it as you can see in the thicket. It is all jagged with the brown butts of its old fallen leaves; and among the butts perch broad-leaved ferns and fleshy orchids, and above them, just below the plume of mighty fronds, the yellow fox’s brush, which is its spathe of flower. What next? Above the Corcorites dangle, amid a dozen different kinds of leaves, festoons of a liane, or of two, for one has purple flowers, the other yellow--Bignonias, Bauhinias--what not? And through them a Carat palm has thrust its thin, bending stem and spread out its flat head of fan-shaped leaves twenty feet long each: while over it, I verily believe, hangs eighty feet aloft the head of the very tree upon whose roots we are sitting. For amid the green cloud you may see sprigs of leaf somewhat like that of a weeping willow; and there, probably, is the trunk to which they belong, or rather what will be a trunk at last. At present it is like a number of round edged boards of every size, set on end, and slowly coalescing at their edges. There is a slit down the middle of the trunk, twenty or thirty feet long. You may see the green light of the forest shining through it. Yes, that is probably the fig; or, if not, then something else. For who am I, that I should know the hundredth part of the forms on which we look? And above all you catch a glimpse of that crimson mass of Norantea which we admired just now; and, black as yew against the blue sky and white cloud, the plumes of one Palmiste, who has climbed toward the light, it may be for centuries, through the green cloud; and now, weary and yet triumphant, rests her dark head among the bright foliage of a Ceiba, and feeds unhindered on the sun. There, take your tired eyes down again; and turn them right or left, where you will, to see the same scene, and yet never the same. New forms, new combinations; wealth of creative Genius--let us use the wise old word in its true sense--incomprehensible by the human intellect or the human eye, even as He is who made it all, whose garment, or rather whose speech, it is. MILK-SAP PLANTS --M. J. SCHLEIDEN