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Updated: June 23, 2025
We travelled seven miles in a south-west direction, to lat. 16 degrees 15 minutes 11 seconds, over an entirely flat country, covered with a very open forest of box, of bloodwood, and of the stiff-leaved Melaleuca, with the arborescent Grevillea already mentioned, and with a species of Terminalia with winged fruit.
The margins of these streams were paradises of leafiness and verdure; the most striking feature being the variety of ferns, with immense leaves, some terrestrial, others climbing over trees, and two, at least, arborescent.
The cannas, the heliconias with fine purple flowers, the costuses, and other plants of the amomum family, here attain eight or ten feet in height, and their fresh tender verdure, their silky gloss, and the extraordinary development of the parenchyma, form a striking contrast with the brown colour of the arborescent ferns, the foliage of which is delicately shaped.
My Malays worked hard at their paddles, and late in the afternoon we left the main Sarekei River and paddled up a small and extremely narrow stream. There we found ourselves in the depth of a most luxuriant vegetation. We were in a regular tunnel formed by arching ferns and orchid-laden trees, giant pandanus, various palms and arborescent ferns and caladiums.
We say to ourselves that, without being life, a machine is something more than matter, for man has added a little of his mind to it. Now the iron beast, consuming its ration of coal, is really browsing the ancient foliage of arborescent ferns in which solar energy has accumulated. Beasts of flesh and blood act no otherwise.
Uncouth, incomplete in their transformation, they wandered amidst the arborescent foliage, already flourishing when none of the insects sprung of more complex forms of metamorphosis were as yet in existence: neither butterflies, beetles, flies, nor bees.
The remaining five per cent. consists mostly of different species of oak, ash, maple, mountain-mahogany, aspen, cottonwood, California buckeye, western red-bud, arborescent willows, alders, etc.
The ascertained dicotyledons, or higher-class plants, are comparatively few in this formation; but it will be found that they constantly increased as the globe grew older. In the coal of Baffin's Bay, of Newcastle, and of the torrid zone alike, are the fossil ferns arborescent, shewing clearly that, in that era, the present tropical temperature, or one even higher, existed in very high latitudes.
They could point to the arborescent forms assumed by hoar-frost and by sundry metallic minerals as evidence of the existence in nature of a "plastic force" competent to enable inorganic matter to assume the form of organised bodies.
Palm-trees grow in lat 37 degs.; an arborescent grass, very like a bamboo, in 40 degs.; and another closely allied kind, of great length, but not erect, flourishes even as far south as 45 degs.
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