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Or is it merely a lowly decoration, not designed to court the ardent gaze of the sun, but to brighten an otherwise bare space of Mother Earth with a spot of fugitive purple? Widely different are the ant-house plants, of which North Queensland has two genera. One is purely an epiphyte, growing attached to a tree like many of the orchids.

Hot and cold, cold and hot, and no medium. Crystal waters; green shadows under coverture of broad, moist leaves; and night with dewy fanning winds these chilled but did not refresh me; a region in which there was no sweet and pleasant thing; where even the ita palm and mountain glory and airy epiphyte starring the woodland twilight with pendent blossoms had lost all grace and beauty; where all brilliant colours in earth and heaven were like the unmitigated sun that blinded my sight and burnt my brain.

The plant forms are strange and various, making mosaic of contrasting range of leaf-size and leaf-shape, palm and grass and fern, epiphyte and liana and clumpy mistletoe, of grace and clumsiness and even misproportion, a tall thick landscape all mingled into a symmetry of disorder that charms the attention and fascinates the eye. It is a soft and delicious air wherein I sit.

Epid. rhizophorum has been lately rechristened Epid. radicans a name which might be confined to the Mexican variety. For the plant recurs in Brazil, practically the same, but with a certain difference. The former grows on shrubs, a true epiphyte; the latter has its bottom roots in the soil, at foot of the tallest trees, and runs up to the very summit, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet.

Carruthers has carefully examined the original specimen in the Botanical Museum, Edinburgh, and thinks it may have been an epiphyte. As to the climate of the Coal, the Ferns and the Coniferae are perhaps the two classes of plants which may be most relied upon as leading us to safe conclusions, as the genera are nearly allied to living types.

Here are the poison and its antidote, the monster tree and its miniature epiphyte, the plant that astonishes by its magnitude, and the one that delights us by its minuteness. Here, if anywhere on the face of the earth, may we form some conception of the state of our planet during the Eocene period, before the world had come under the dominion of the human race.

The rivulet was hidden by the luxuriant vegetation of the banks save at one point, where I caught a triangular patch of its glittering water. On the farther side I saw through a bluish haze a tangle of trees and creepers, and above these again the luminous blue of the sky. Here and there a splash of white or crimson marked the blooming of some trailing epiphyte.