animal was left behind at the end of the railroad.

The first sight of a tropical forest fills the beholder with astonishment and admiration. The lofty trees, their trunks for many feet above the ground hidden in dense, luxuriant foliage, their tops concealed by festoons of trailing vines; the glowing patches of many-hued flowers; the glimpses of birds of gorgeous plumage, excite mingled feelings of wonder and delight. The most striking thing, however, is the extraordinary exuberance of vegetable life. Form upon form, one plant upon another, is the rule. Not only is the earth covered with vegetation, but the trees also. The giants of the forest are overloaded with parasitical burdens. "Numerous epiphytes-tillandsias, orchids, ferns, and a hundred others make every big tree an aerial garden. Great arums perch on the forks and send down roots like cords to the ground. Lianas wind round every trunk and hang from every bough, passing from tree to tree, and entangling the giants in a great network of coiling cables, as the serpents did Laocoon; the simile being strengthened by the fact that

many of the trees are really strangled in the winding folds. Sometimes a tree appears covered with beautiful flowers, which do not belong to it, but to one of the lianas that twines through its branchs and sends down great ropelike stems to the ground. Climbing ferns and vanilla cling to the trunks, and a thousand epiphytes perch themselves on the branches. Among these are large arums that send down aerial roots, tough and strong, and universally used instead of cordage by the natives.

"Among the undergrowth several species of palms, varying in height from two to fifteen feet, are common; and now and then magnificent tree ferns, sending off their feathery crowns twenty feet from the ground, delight the sight with their graceful elegance. Great broad-leaved heliconiæ, leathery melastomæ, and succulent - stemmed, lopsided leaved begonias are abundant, and typical of tropical American forests. Not less so are the cecropia trees, with their white stems and large palmated leaves standing up like great candelabras. Sometimes the ground is carpeted with large

flowers, yellow, pink, or white, that have fallen from some invisible treetop above, or the air is filled with a delicious perfume, for the source of which one seeks around in vain, as the flowers that cause it are far overhead out of sight, lost in the great overshadowing crown of verdure.*

Another remarkable fact is that nearly every great tree is different from its neighbor. In nearly every instance their trunks rise to the height of more than a hundred feet without a limb. One tree of frequent occurrence has great radial, buttress-like roots, extending outward fifteen to twenty-five feet and merging in the trunk about twenty feet above the ground, so that it would be possible to build a good-sized cabin between any two of them. The natives say this tree is a species of fig, but I could not ascertain that it bears any edible fruit. Other large trees are the mahogany, a species of cedar (Cedrela odorata), from which the natives hollow their canoes and "bungoes;" the cortess, with a wood as hard as ebony; the nispera, whose timber is almost indestructible;

*Belt.

and another species of wild fig (Castilloa elastica), from which the rubber of Nicaragua is procured.

Our path followed the railroad clearing for a mile from the end of the road, and then plunged into the unbroken forest. The trail, if such it could be called, had been cut by a surveying party and afterward used occasionally by telegraph linemen, but vines and weeds and fallen trees had almost obliterated it, and but for our guides, members of the engineering and telegraph corps, we should have been hopelessly lost at the end of the first three hundred yards. As a matter of fact, the guides, armed with the machete a knife with a broad, heavy blade three feet long-cut our path anew. The unbroken leafy canopy above completely shut out the sun's rays, or admitted them in occasional shafts, while a tangled mass of underbrush, vines, shrubs and small palms confined the view to a few feet on all sides. The soggy earth was broken by roots and logs that tripped our feet at every other step. A young member of the party, who had donned a white cotton suit for the march, was tipped over by one of