n so as almost to reach the
ground. These are generally six or eight feet long, bearing large and
handsome flowers three inches across, and varying in colour from orange
to red, with deep purple-red spots. I measured one spike, which reached
the extraordinary length of nine feet eight inches, and bore thirty-six
flowers, spirally arranged upon a slender thread-like stalk. Specimens
grown in our English hot-houses have produced flower-spires of equal
length, and with a much larger number of blossoms.

Flowers were scarce, as is usual in equatorial forests, and it was only
at rare intervals that I met with anything striking. A few fine
climbers were sometimes seen, especially a handsome crimson and yellow
Aeschynanthus, and a fine leguminous plant with clusters of large
Cassia-like flowers of a rich purple colour. Once I found a number
of small Anonaceous trees of the genus Polyalthea, producing a most
striking effect in the gloomy forest shades. They were about thirty feet
high, and their slender trunks were covered with large star-like crimson
flowers, which clustered over them like garlands, and resembled some
artificial decoration more than a natural product.

The forests abound with gigantic trees with cylindrical, buttressed, or
furrowed stems, while occasionally the traveller comes upon a wonderful
fig-tree, whose trunk is itself a forest of stems and aerial roots.
Still more rarely are found trees which appear to have begun growing in
mid-air, and from the same point send out wide-spreading branches above
and a complicated pyramid of roots descending for seventy or eighty feet
to the ground below, and so spreading on every side, that one can stand
in the very centre with the trunk of the tree immediately overhead.
Trees of this character are found all over the Archipelago, and the
accompanying illustration (taken from one which I often visited in the
Aru Islands) will convey some idea of their general character. I believe
that they originate as parasites, from seeds carried by birds and
dropped in the fork of some lofty tree. Hence descend aerial roots,
clasping and ultimately destroying the supporting tree, which is in time
entirely replaced by the humble plant which was at first dependent upon
it. Thus we have an actual struggle for life in the vegetable kingdom,
not less fatal to the vanquished than the struggles among animals which
we can so much more easily observe and understand. The advantage of
quicker ac