sight and possibly into the lower branches of the big tree.  And what are their species? what are their families?  Who knows?  Not even the most experienced woodman or botanist can tell you the names of plants of which he only sees the stems.  The leaves, the flowers, the fruit, can only be examined by felling the tree; and not even always then, for sometimes the tree when cut refuses to fall, linked as it is by chains of liane to all the trees around.  Even that wonderful water-vine which we cut through just now may be one of three or even four different plants. {132}

Soon you will be struck by the variety of the vegetation, and will recollect what you have often heard, that social plants are rare in the tropic forests.  Certainly they are rare in Trinidad; where the only instances of social trees are the Moras (which I have never seen growing wild) and the Moriche palms.  In Europe, a forest is usually made up of one dominant plant—­of firs or of pines, of oaks or of beeches, of birch or of heather.  Here no two plants seem alike.  There are more species on an acre here than in all the New Forest, Savernake, or Sherwood.  Stems rough, smooth, prickly, round, fluted, stilted, upright, sloping, branched, arched, jointed, opposite-leaved, alternate-leaved, leaflets, or covered with leaves of every conceivable pattern, are jumbled together, till the eye and brain are tired of continually asking ‘What next?’ The stems are of every colour—­copper, pink, gray, green, brown, black as if burnt, marbled with lichens, many of them silvery white, gleaming afar in the bush, furred with mosses and delicate creeping film-ferns, or laced with the air-roots of some parasite aloft.  Up this stem scrambles a climbing Seguine {133a} with entire leaves; up the next another quite different, with deeply-cut leaves; {133b} up the next the Ceriman {133c} spreads its huge leaves, latticed and forked again and again.  So fast do they grow, that they have not time to fill up the spaces between their nerves, and are, consequently full of oval holes; and so fast does its spadix of flowers expand, that (as indeed do some other Aroids) an actual genial heat and fire of passion, which may be tested by the thermometer, or even by the hand, is given off during fructification.  Beware of breaking it, or the Seguines.  They will probably give off an evil smell, and as probably a blistering milk.  Look on at the next stem.  Up it, and down again, a climbing fern {133d} which is often seen in hothouses has tangled its finely-cut fronds.  Up the next, a quite different fern is crawling, by pressing tightly to the rough bark its creeping root-stalks, furred like a hare’s leg.  Up the next, the prim little Griffe-chatte {133e} plant has walked, by numberless clusters of small cats’-claws, which lay hold of the bark.  And what is this delicious scent about the air?  Vanille?  Of course it is; and up that stem zigzags the green fleshy chain of the Vanille Orchis.