feet of
leaf-and-timber mould. And here, in a forest equally ancient, every
plant is growing out of the bare yellow loam, as it might in a well-
hoed garden bed. Is it not strange?

Most strange; till you remember where you are--in one of Nature's
hottest and dampest laboratories. Nearly eighty inches of yearly
rain and more than eighty degrees of perpetual heat make swift work
with vegetable fibre, which, in our cold and sluggard clime, would
curdle into leaf-mould, perhaps into peat. Far to the north, in
poor old Ireland, and far to the south, in Patagonia, begin the
zones of peat, where dead vegetable fibre, its treasures of light
and heat locked up, lies all but useless age after age. But this is
the zone of illimitable sun-force, which destroys as swiftly as it
generates, and generates again as swiftly as it destroys. Here,
when the forest giant falls, as some tell me that they have heard
him fall, on silent nights, when the cracking of the roots below and
the lianes aloft rattles like musketry through the woods, till the
great trunk comes down, with a boom as of a heavy gun, re-echoing on
from mountain-side to mountain-side; then--

'Nothing in him that doth fade,
But doth suffer an _air_-change
Into something rich and strange.'

Under the genial rain and genial heat the timber tree itself, all
its tangled ruin of lianes and parasites, and the boughs and leaves
snapped off not only by the blow, but by the very wind, of the
falling tree--all melt away swiftly and peacefully in a few months--
say almost a few days--into the water, and carbonic acid, and
sunlight, out of which they were created at first, to be absorbed
instantly by the green leaves around, and, transmuted into fresh
forms of beauty, leave not a wrack behind. Explained thus--and this
I believe to be the true explanation--the absence of leaf-mould is
one of the grandest, as it is one of the most startling, phenomena
of the forest.

Look here at a fresh wonder. Away in front of us a smooth gray
pillar glistens on high. You can see neither the top nor the bottom
of it. But its colour, and its perfectly cylindrical shape, tell
you what it is--a glorious Palmiste; one of those queens of the
forest which you saw standing in the fields; with its capital buried
in the green cloud and its base buried in that bank of green velvet
plumes, which you must skirt carefully round, for they are a prickly
dwarf palm,