1218. In equinoctial and tropical countries, where a sufficient supply of moisture combines with the influence of light and heat, vegetation appears in all its magnitude and glory. Its lower orders, mosses, fungi, and confervæ, are very rare. The ferns are aborescent. Reeds ascend to the height of a hundred feet, and rigid grasses rise to forty. The forests are composed of majestic leafy evergreen trees bearing brilliant blossoms, their colours finely contrasting, scarcely any two standing together being of the same species. Enormous creepers climb their trunks; parasitical orchidæ hang in festoons from branch to branch, and augment the floral decoration with scarlet, purple, blue, rose, and golden dyes. Of plants used by man for food, or as luxuries, or for medicinal purposes, occurring in this region, rice, bananas, dates, cocoa, cacao, bread-fruit, coffee, tea, sugar, vanilla, Peruvian bark, pepper, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmegs, are either characteristic of it as principally cultivated within its limits, or entirely confined to them. 1219. Rice (_Oryza-sativa_), the chief food of, perhaps, a third of the human race, is cultivated beyond the tropics, but principally within them, only where there is a plentiful supply of water. It has never been found wild; its native country is unknown; but probably southern Asia. 1220. Bananas, or plantains (_Musa sapientum et paradisiaca_), are cultivated in intertropical Asia, Africa, and America. The latter species occur in Syria. The banana is not known in an uncultivated state. Its produce is enormous, estimated to be on the same space of ground to that of wheat, as 133 to 1, and to that of potatoes as 44 to 1.