What next?  Above the Cocorites dangle, amid a dozen different kinds of leaves, festoons of a liane, or of two, for one has purple flowers, the other yellow—­Bignonias, Bauhinias—­what not?  And through them a Carat {140a} palm has thrust its thin bending stem, and spread out its flat head of fan-shaped leaves twenty feet long each:  while over it, I verily believe, hangs eighty feet aloft the head of the very tree upon whose roots we are sitting.  For amid the green cloud you may see sprigs of leaf somewhat like that of a weeping willow; {140b} and there, probably, is the trunk to which they belong, or rather what will be a trunk at last.  At present it is like a number of round-edged boards of every size, set on end, and slowly coalescing at their edges.  There is a slit down the middle of the trunk, twenty or thirty feet long.  You may see the green light of the forest shining through it.  Yes.  That is probably the fig; or, if not, then something else.  For who am I, that I should know the hundredth part of the forms on which we look?—­And above all you catch a glimpse of that crimson mass of Norantea which we admired just now; and, black as yew against the blue sky and white cloud, the plumes of one Palmiste, who has climbed toward the light, it may be for centuries, through the green cloud; and now, weary and yet triumphant, rests her dark head among the bright foliage of a Ceiba, and feeds unhindered on the sun.

There, take your tired eyes down again; and turn them right, or left, or where you will, to see the same scene, and yet never the same.  New forms, new combinations; a wealth of creative Genius—­let us use the wise old word in its true sense—­incomprehensible by the human intellect or the human eye, even as He is who makes it all, Whose garment, or rather Whose speech, it is.  The eye is not filled with seeing, or the ear with hearing; and never would be, did you roam these forests for a hundred years.  How many years would you need merely to examine and discriminate the different species?  And when you had done that, how many more to learn their action and reaction on each other?  How many more to learn their virtues, properties, uses?  How many more to answer the perhaps ever unanswerable question—­How they exist and grow at all?  By what miracle they are compacted out of light, air, and water, each after its kind?  How, again, those kinds began to be, and what they were like at first?  Whether those crowded, struggling, competing shapes are stable or variable?  Whether or not they are varying still?  Whether even now, as we sit here, the great God may not be creating, slowly but surely, new forms of beauty round us?  Why not?  If He chose to do it, could He not do it?  And even had you answered that question, which would require whole centuries of observation as patient and accurate as that which Mr. Darwin employed on Orchids and climbing plants, how much