TRAVELS IN THE BRAZILS. 111 TRAVELS IN THE BRAZILS. A SCENE IN THE BRAZILIAN FOREST. THE Brazilian forest is characterized by its gigantic trees, intertwined with innumerable parasitical and flowery shrubs. The leafless bauhinias, often forty feet in length-single, or twisted over each other like ships' cables, descend from the trunks and branches of the primeval forest, and root firmly in the ground; other ropes and thinner threads, which have not yet reached the ground, swing to and fro between the agitated foliage. Another form, which itself grows to the size of a tree, more mighty than it, both in mass and vitality, despises the destination to serve as a support to the primeval trunks, and becomes their irreconcileable enemy. With its bold embrace it has girdled the juicy laurel tree, or the immense berthobletia, and spreading itself, from year to year, more widely round the patient tree, it threatens to hem the ways of the sap of life, and finally to kill it. Another vast creeper has already succeeded in this, the conquered stem, undermined, rapidly rots and falls, or rather stands, a strange and ghastly sight, held awry, or rather hanging in the mouldering gloom of the forest. The deadly lianes, which, at first, only seem to seek support from their peaceful neighbours, spread voraciously over their surface, girdle them closely and more closely in their embrace, extracting from them all their vital juices. The development of this kind of creepers is founded in their peculiar mode of life. At first they grow erect, like weak shrubs, but as soon as they have obtained the support of another tree, they leave their original way of nourishment and become parasites, spreading themselves over the surface of the other stem, and henceforth drawing their principal nourishment from it. The stems of these parasites possess the singular quality, that, whenever they are excited by contact, they free themselves from their bark, and gradually and equally expand over the foreign substance, to which they attach themselves. When the vital force of the original root has thus been weakened, the stem supplies the loss by sending new air-roots down to the ground, which gain new expansion and strength. Many of these plants produce large flowers, of rich colours, which, growing in considerable masses inoculate, as it were, other stems and tree-tops with a foreign foliage, producing an extraordinary effect in the chiaroscuro of the tropical forest. These creepers, as well as the hostile parasites which, in community with them often cover, and finally destroy the larger trees, frequently emit coloured or milky juices, which often act upon the bodies of animals, or men, as sharp and deadening poisons, and are seldom quite harmless. Hence it is dangerous to entangle one's |