Inconsequent as Nature appears to be at times and given to whims, fancies and contradictions, only those who study with attention her moods may estimate how truthful and how sober she really is.  She is honest in all her purposes, and though changeful and gay in apparel never cheap nor meretricious.  A slim-shafted palm shooting through the leafy mantle, and swaying airily a profuse mass of fiery red seeds, distinctive in shape, may be the prototype of a flirt, but the flirtation which arrests attention and bewitches the beholder is also innoxious.  There is nothing of the artificial about the display.  The colours flaunted are true, perfect and pure, however cunningly, however boldly by their means admiration is challenged.  The true lover knows too that in her least conspicuous moods, Nature is as consistent and as wonderful as when in her exuberance she carpets a continent with flowers, and when all the forests of a country, at her bidding, don a mantle of yellow.

To exaggerate any of her methods were needless.  She is never ugly, for in her seemingly forbidding moods she wears a smiling face.  The smiles may not be apparent to all, but they are there for those who expect and look for them.

Let a mangrove swamp be taken as an illustration of an untoward aspect of Nature, and see whether among the apparent confusion, and the mud and slime and the unpleasant odours, there are not many proofs of good humour, kindly disposition, real prettiness, and orderly and systematic purpose.

On the deltas and banks of all the rivers and creeks of North Queensland and on many of the more sheltered beaches, the mangrove flourishes, that ambitious tree which performs an important function in the scheme of Nature.  Its botanical title reveals its special character—­Rhizaphora.  Very diverse indeed are the means by which plants are distributed.  While some are borne, some fly and others float.  The mangrove is maritime.  While still pendant from the pear-shaped fruit of the parent tree, the seed, a spindle-shaped radicle, varying in length from a foot to 4 feet, germinates—­ready to form a plant immediately upon arrival at a suitable locality.  A sharp spike at the apex represents the embryo leaves ready to unfold, while the roots spring from the opposite and slightly heavier end.  The weight is so nicely adjusted that the spindle floats perpendicularly or nearly so, when owning a separate existence from the parent tree, it drops into the water, and begins its remarkable career.

It has been suggested that the viviparity of the mangrove is a survival of a very remote period in the development of the earth—­that a mangrove swamp represents an age when the earth was enveloped in clouds and mist; and that with the gradual decrease in tepid aqueous vapour the viviparous habit, then almost universal, was lost, except in the case of this plant.  Other plants, however, exhibit the characteristic.  Notably one of the handsomest of the local ferns (asplenium