Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/25

 lily ponds, where one can see growing with wonderful luxuriance the Victoria regia and other tropical water lilies. A pond full of lotus (Nelumbo) with thousands of white, pink and crimson flowers, was a truly magnificent sight.

Unfortunately, practically none of the original forest has been left in the immediate vicinity of the city, and one must go a long way before one can see the untouched native vegetation.

A day's sail from Demerara brings the traveler to Paramaribo, the capital of Surinam (Dutch Guiana). Paramaribo is a picturesque town, the high-gabled houses with their quaint stoops and doorways looking curiously alien under the shade of great mahogany trees and royal palms. Some of the houses, the former residences of wealthy Dutch merchants, are fine examples of their kind, and recall the flourishing days of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the trade of Surinam was much more important than it is to-day.

The streets are lined with rows of palms and other tropical trees, among which the finest are the gigantic old mahogany trees.

The botanical gardens lie on the edge of the town, and are devoted principally to the cultivation of various economic plants—cocoa, rubber of various kinds, oranges, mangoes, bananas, coffee—and other less known tropical products.

To the botanist, undoubtedly the most interesting feature of the garden is a tract of untouched forest immediately adjoining it. This is an excellent sample of the predominant forest of the region. The greater part of this forest is more or less submerged for much of the time, but at intervals in this swamp are low ridges of more sandy soil, and in these drier areas grow the largest trees, two of which, the silk-cotton (Ceiba pentandra) and the sand-box (Hura crepitans) are veritable giants. The trunks and branches of these great trees were covered with numerous epiphytes, among which the Bromeliaceæ take first place. Several species of Tillandsia, including the familiar T. usneoides, the "Spanish moss" of our own Gulf States, were conspicuous. Clinging to the giant trunks, or festooned from tree to tree, were many lianas, some of great size. Convolvulaceæ, Bignoniaceæ, and especially the giant scandent Aroids—Philodendron, Monstera, Syngonium, and others—were noticeable among the tangle of creepers.

An undergrowth of dwarf palms and many showy Scitamineæ, especially species of Canna and Heliconia, gave the finishing touch to this truly tropical picture.

Almost no ferns were to be seen, and bryophytes—especially liverworts—were few and inconspicuous. Of the latter, only a few small leafy Jungermanniaceæ, growing on the tree trunks, were noted. In the town, and about the garden, a few epiphytic ferns were common.