rests upon sand, while the plateau is of chocolate-coloured soil intermixed on the surface with flakes of slate; and from this sure foundation springs the backbone of the island.  On the flat, the plateau, and the hillsides, the forest consists of similar trees—­alike in age and character for all the difference in soil—­the one tree that does not leave the flat being the tea or melaleuca.  In some places the jungle comes down to the water’s edge, the long antennae of the lawyer vine toying with the rod-like aerial roots of the mangrove.

The plateau is the park of the island, half a mile broad, and a mile and more long.  Upon it grows the best of the bloodwoods (eucalyptus CORYNBOSA), the red stringy bark (E.  ROBUSTA), Moreton Bay ash (E.  TESSALARIS), various wattles, the gin-gee of the blacks (DIPLANTHERA TETRAPHYLLA).  Pandanus AQUATICUS marks the courses and curves of some of the gullies.  A creek, hidden in a broad ribbon of jungle and running from a ravine in the range to the sea, divides our park in fairly equal portions.

Most part of the range is heavily draped with jungle—­that is, on the western aspect.  Just above the splash of the Pacific surges on the weather or eastern side, low-growing scrub and restricted areas of forest, with expansive patches of jungle, plentifully intermixed with palms and bananas, creep up the precipitous ascent to the summit of the range—­870 feet above the sea.  So steep is the Pacific slope that, standing on the top of the ridge and looking down, you catch mosaic gleams of the sea among the brown and grey tree-trunks.  But for the prodigality of the vegetation, one slide might take you from the cool mountain-top to the cooler sea.  The highest peak, which presents a buttressed face to the north, and overlooks our peaceful bay, is crowned with a forest of bloodwoods, upon which the jungle steadily encroaches.  The swaying fronds of aspiring palms, adorned in due season with masses of straw-coloured inflorescence, to be succeeded by loose bunches of red, bead-like berries, shoot out from the pall of leafage.  In the gloomy gullies are slender-shafted palms and tree-ferns, while ferns and mosses cover the soil with living tapestry, and strange, snake-like epiphytes cling in sinuous curves to the larger trees.  The trail of the lawyer vine (Calamus OBSTRUENS), with its leaf sheath and long tentacles bristling with incurved hooks, is over it all.  Huge cables of vines trail from tree to tree, hanging in loops and knots and festoons, the largest (ENTADA SCANDENS) bearing pods 4 feet long and 4 inches broad, containing a dozen or so brown hard beans used for match-boxes.  Along the edge of the jungle, the climbing fern (LYNGODIUM) grows in tangled masses sending its slender wire-like lengths up among the trees—­the most attractive of all the ferns, and glorified by some with the title of “the Fern of God,” so surpassing its grace and beauty.