Two very different trees grow in those little visited primeval forests of Java. All the paths leading to them are closed and watched, like those leading to the gates of the Holy of Holies. With fire and axe must the road be made through the impenetrably interwoven mass of lianes, the paullinias, with their clusters of great scarlet blossoms several feet long, the cissi or wild vines, on the widespread creeping roots of which thrives the gigantic flower of the Rafflesia Arnoldi. Palms, with spines and thorns, rush-like plants with cutting leaves, wounding like knives, warn the intruder back by their attacks, and in every part of the thicket threaten the fearful nettles formerly mentioned. Great black ants, whose painful bite tortures the wanderer, and countless swarms of tormenting insects pursue him. Are these obstacles overcome? Yet follow the dense bundles of bamboo stems, as thick as a man’s arm, and often fifty feet high, the firm glassy bark of which repels even the axe. At last the way is opened and the majestic aisles of the true primeval forest now display themselves. Gigantic trunks of the bread-fruit, of the iron-like teak (Tectona grandis), of Leguminosæ, with their beautiful blossoms, of Barringtonias, figs, and bays, form the columns which support the massive green vault. From branch to branch leap lively troops of apes, provoking the wanderer by throwing fruit upon him. From a moss-clad rock the melancholy orang-outang raises himself gravely on his staff, and wanders into deeper thickets. All is full of animal life; a strong contrast to the desert and silent character of many of the primeval forests of America. Here a twining, climbing shrub, with a trunk as thick as one’s arm, coils round the columns of the dome, overpassing the loftiest trees, often quite simple and unbranched for a length of a hundred feet from the root, but curved and winding in the most varied forms. The large, shining green leaves alternate with the long and stout tendrils with which it takes firm hold, and greenish-white heads of pleasant smelling flowers hang pendent from it. This plant, belonging to the Apocynaceæ, is the Tjettek of the natives (Strychnos Tieute), from the roots of which the dreadful Upas Radia, or Sovereign Poison, is concocted. A slight wound from a weapon poisoned with this--a little arrow made of hard wood, and shot from the blow-tube, as by the South Americans--makes the tiger tremble, stand motionless a minute, then fall as though seized with vertigo, and die in brief but violent convulsions. The shrub itself is harmless, and he whose skin may have been touched with its juice need fear no consequences. As we go forward, we meet with a beautiful slender stem, which overtops the neighboring plants. Perfectly cylindrical, it rises sixty or eighty feet, smooth and without a branch, and bears an elegant hemispherical crown, which proudly looks down on the more humble growths around, and the many climbers struggling up its stem. Woe to