Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/508

504 hole presents a tendency to fall into the well-worn path that leads down to amphibious quarters.

On the broad highway of terrestrial life the effort and adaptation has been to develop speed, strength, protective coverings, colors, etc., and here has been the widest and strongest struggle for supremacy that the world has witnessed. The contest for domination between the giants of old ocean—of sharks and devil-fishes, and saurians and whales, pales into insignificance compared with the battle waged between the huge terrestrial reptiles, birds, elephants, mastodons, horses, lions and man which has raged on terra firma. From this have come perfection of speed to one—power and energy to another, but, above all, intelligence and the dominance of brain. Out of this highway, too, run numerous and devious by-paths, the following of which furnishes us with a host of strange and fanciful creations—adaptations to extremes of heat and cold, moisture and dryness, latitude and altitude, plain and forest.

But, not content with solid earth, animal life finds its way upward into vegetation of various kinds and particularly in tree growth, reaches adaptations which become so fixed that life elsewhere would be an impossibility. This is especially marked in the great tangle of tropical forests. In these the animal life of the tree tops assumes a most pronounced character, which can scarcely be appreciated by one familiar only with lesser forests of temperate regions. Pictures fail to show the real density, for pictures must show the breaks and gaps to show at all. But perhaps the most dominant thought in the presence of such forest life is the superabundance of life, life everywhere, under every scrap of loose bark, every tuft of grass, on branch, and twig and leaf. In my despair of giving an adequate idea of this tropical tangle, I turn to an article in Harper's Magazine by Lafcadio Hearn on a midsummer trip to the West Indies, in which he quotes from DeRafz:

When your eyes grow weary—if it is indeed possible for them to weary of contemplating the exterior of these tremendous woods, try to penetrate a little way into their interior. What an inextricable chaos it is! The sands of the sea are not more closely pressed together than the trees are here—some straight, some curved, some upright, some toppling, falling, or leaning against one another, or heaped high upon each other. Climbing lianas, which cross from one tree to the other, like ropes passing from mast to mast, help to fill up the gaps in this treillage; and parasites—not timid parasites like ivy or moss, but parasites that are grafted upon trees—dominate the primitive trunk, overwhelm them, usurp the place of their foliage and fall back upon the soil forming factitious weeping willows. You do not find here as in the great forests of the north, the eternal monotony of beech and fir; this is the kingdom of infinite variety—species, the most diverse, elbow each other, interlace, strangle each other and down them. All ranks and orders are confounded as in a human mob.