A mysterious twilight encompasses us, which serves to intensify the radiance of the occasional sunbeam as it falls on a glossy palm-leaf, or on a large bunch of purple orchid-flowers. Splendid trunks, some of them from twenty to thirty feet in diameter, rise like so many pillars supporting the dense green vault of foliage; and every variety of tall, graceful palms, spare and bushy, and bearing heavy berries of bright yellow or red, struggle to catch a glimpse of the light, from which they are shut out by the neighboring giants, of which the figueira (or wild fig-tree) is one of the most striking, in the dimensions of its crown and stem, and in the strange shape of its roots, which project like huge outworks. These seem to grow in all directions, forming props, stays, and cross-bars wherever they are wanted, just as if the whole were a soft plastic mass, the sole purpose of which was to supply, with a minimum of material, as much stability as possible to the trunk, whose wood is of extreme softness and whose roots are not deep. The pachiuba-palm (_Iriartea exorhiza_) and some species of Cecropiae exhibit other extravagances in their roots. They appear as if standing on stilts, the real trunks only beginning at eight or ten feet above ground. But, more than all, it is the profusion of orchids and Bromeliae that excites our admiration. These bright children of the tropics envelop with dense foliage as well the fallen and mouldering trunks as those yet upstanding in full vigor and bloom, thus forming hanging gardens of astounding magnificence, which reveal leaves and flowers of the most irregular shapes and colors. Everywhere, on the branches and on the ground, and even from out the fissures of the bare rock, light ferns and rich moss spring up and clothe the decaying trunks with fresh green. Of mosses and ferns, especially tree-ferns, we found a greater exuberance and a larger variety, in species as well as in individuals, in the Southern provinces of the empire, Sao Paulo and Parana; but for splendid palms and gigantic dicotyledons the North is decidedly the richer of the two.