Columbus, to his surprise, saw true pines growing in the Tropics--
all over the Llanos, and down to Brazil; an ancient, ugly, sturdy
form of vegetation, able to get a scanty living out of the poorest
soils, and consequently triumphant, as yet, in the battle of life.

The soil of the Savanna was a poor sandy clay, treacherous, and
often impassable for horses, being half dried above and wet beneath.
The vegetation grew, not over the whole, but in innumerable
tussocks, which made walking very difficult. The type of the rushes
and grasses was very English; but among them grew, here and there,
plants which excited my astonishment; above all, certain Bladder-
worts, {259c} which I had expected to find, but which, when found,
were so utterly unlike any English ones, that I did not recognise at
first what they were. Our English Bladder-worts, as everybody
knows, float in stagnant water on tangles of hair-like leaves,
something like those of the Water-Ranunculus, but furnished with
innumerable tiny bladders; and this raft supports the little scape
of yellow snapdragon-like flowers. There are in Trinidad and other
parts of South America Bladder-worts of this type. But those which
we found to-day, growing out of the damp clay, were more like in
habit to a delicate stalk of flax, or even a bent of grass, upright,
leafless or all but leafless, with heads of small blue or yellow
flowers, and carrying, in one species, a few very minute bladders
about the roots, in another none at all. A strange variation from
the normal type of the family; yet not so strange, after all, as
that of another variety in the high mountain woods, which, finding
neither ponds to float in nor swamp to root in, has taken to lodging
as a parasite among the wet moss on tree-trunks; not so strange,
either, as that of yet another, which floats, but in the most
unexpected spots, namely, in the water which lodges between the
leaf-sheaths of the wild pines, perched on the tree-boughs, a
parasite on parasites; and sends out long runners, as it grows,
along the bough, in search of the next wild pine and its tiny
reservoirs.

In the face of such strange facts, is it very absurd to guess that
these Utricularias, so like each other in their singular and highly
specialised flowers, so unlike each other in the habit of the rest
of the plant, have started from some one original type perhaps long
since extinct; and that, carried by b