the columns of a church nave. There thrive mimosas and
various species of fig, and climbing palms are not ashamed of their
inquisitiveness.

See this tree 200 feet high, with its round, hard fruits as large as a
child's head! When they are ripe they fall, and the shell opens to let
out the triangular seeds which we call Brazil nuts.

Look at the indiarubber tree with its light-coloured stem, its
light-green foliage, and its white sap, which, when congealed, rolls
round motor wheels through streets and roads.

Here again is a tree that every one knows about. It grows to a height of
50 feet, and bears large, smooth, leathery leaves, but its blossoms
issue from the stem and not among the foliage. Its cucumber-shaped
orange fruits ripen at almost all seasons in the perpetual summer of the
Amazons. In the fruit the seeds lie in rows. The tree grows wild in the
forests, but was cultivated by the Indians before the arrival of white
men, and they prepared from it a drink which they called "chocolatl." It
was bitter, but the addition of sugar and vanilla made it palatable.
This tree is called the cocoa-tree.

Still better known and more popular is another drink--coffee. The
coffee-tree is not found in the primeval forests, but in plantations,
and even there it is a guest, for its native country is Kaffa in
Abyssinia, and coffee came from Arabia to Europe through Constantinople.
Now Brazil produces three-fourths of all the world's coffee, and in all
thousands of millions of pounds of coffee are consumed yearly.

The vanilla plant, also, is one of the wonderful inmates of the forests.
In order that the wild plants which are indigenous in the mountain
forests of Mexico and Peru may produce fruit, the pollen must be carried
by insects. Many years ago the plant was transported to the island of
Reunion in the Indian Ocean, where it throve capitally, but bore no
fruit. The helpful insects of its native country were absent. Then
artificial fertilisation with pollen was successfully attempted, and now
Reunion supplies most of the vanilla in the world's markets.

Think again of all the animals which live in the forest and its
outskirts towards the savannahs! There is the singular opossum, and
there is the sluggish, scaly armadillo, which loves the detestable
termites--those white ants which, with their sharp mandibles, gnaw to
pieces paper, clothes, wood, the whole house in fact. Then there is the
climbing sloth, with its round monk