Among the trees the various kinds that have buttresses projecting around their base are the most striking and peculiar. Some of these buttresses are much longer than they are high, springing from a distance of eight or ten feet from the base, and reaching only four or five feet high on the trunk; while others rise to the height of twenty or thirty feet, and can even be distinguished as ribs on the stem to forty or fifty. They are complete wooden walls from six inches to a foot thick, sometimes branching into two or three, and extending straight out to such a distance as to afford room for a comfortable hut in the angle between them. Other trees again appear as if they were formed by a number of slender stems growing together. They are deeply furrowed for their whole height, like the pillars in a cathedral, and in places these furrows reach quite through them, like windows in a narrow tower, yet they run up as high as their loftiest neighbours, with a straight stem of uniform diameter. Another most curious form is presented by those which have many of their roots high above the ground, appearing to stand on many legs, and often forming archways large enough for a man to walk beneath.
The stems of all these trees, and the climbers that wind or wave around them, support a multitude of dependants. Tillandsias and other Bromeliaceæ, resembling wild pine-apples, large climbing Arums, with their dark green, arrowhead-shaped leaves, peppers in great variety, and large-leaved ferns, shoot out at intervals all up the stem to the very topmost branches. Between these, creeping ferns and delicate little species like our Hymenophyllum abound, and in moist dark places the leaves of these are again covered with minute creeping mosses and Jungermannias, so that we have parasites on parasites, and on these parasites again. On looking upwards the infinite variety of foliage, strongly defined against the clear sky, is a striking characteristic of the tropical forest, and the bright sunshine lighting up all above, while a sombre gloom reigns below, adds to the grandeur and solemnity of the scene.
As these vast woods occupy sites of a very different character,--here extending along low river-banks, there climbing the slopes of gigantic mountains,--here under the equator, there on the verge of the tropics, where many of the trees, annually casting their foliage, remind one of the winter of the temperate zone--it is of course quite impossible to embrace all their varieties of form and aspect in one general description.