_Uses of Equatorial Forest-trees._--Amid this immense variety of trees, the natives have found out such as are best adapted to certain purposes. The wood of some is light and soft, and is used for floats or for carving out rude images, stools, and ornaments for boats and houses. The flat slabs of the buttresses are often used to make paddles. Some of the trees with furrowed stems are exceedingly strong and durable, serving as posts for houses or as piles on which the water-villages are built. Canoes, formed from a trunk hollowed out and spread open under the action of heat, require one kind of wood, those built up with planks another; and, as the species of trees in these forests are so much more numerous than the wants of a semi-civilized population, there are probably a large number of kinds of timber which will some day be found to be well adapted to the special requirements of the arts and sciences. The products of the trees of the equatorial forests, notwithstanding our imperfect knowledge of them, are already more useful to civilized man than to the indigenous inhabitants. To mention only a few of those whose names are tolerably familiar to us, we have such valuable woods as mahogany, teak, ebony, lignum-vitæ, purple-heart, iron-wood, sandal-wood, and satin-wood; such useful gums as india-rubber, gutta-percha, tragacanth, copal, lac, and dammar; such dyes as are yielded by log-wood, brazil-wood, and sappan-wood; such drugs as the balsams of Capivi and Tolu, camphor, benzoin, catechu or terra-japonica, cajuput oil, gamboge, quinine, Angostura bark, quassia, and the urari and upas poisons; of spices we have cloves, cinnamon, and nutmegs; and of fruits, brazil-nuts, tamarinds, guavas, and the valuable cacao; while residents in our tropical colonies enjoy the bread-fruit, avocado-pear, custard-apple, durian, mango, mangosteen, soursop, papaw, and many others. This list of useful products from the exogenous trees alone of the equatorial forests, excluding those from the palms, shrubs, herbs, and creepers, might have been multiplied many times over by the introduction of articles whose names would be known only to those interested in special arts or sciences; but imperfect as it is, it will serve to afford a notion of the value of this vast treasure-house which is as yet but very partially explored.