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But to the jungle again, The great bamboo towers up along the river sides in its feathery grace, and behind it the much prized Malacca cane, the rattan, creeping along the ground or climbing trees and knotting them together, with its tough strands, from a hundred to twelve hundred feet in length, matted and matting together while ferns, selaginellas, and lycopodiums struggle for space in which to show their fragile beauty, along with hardier foliaceous plants, brown and crimson, green and crimson, and crimson flecked with gold; and the great and lesser trees alike are loaded with trailers, ferns, and orchids, among which huge masses of the elk-horn fern and the shining five-foot fronds of the Asplenium Nidus are everywhere conspicuous.
Bamboo abounds everywhere: its dense tufts of culms, 100 feet and upwards high, are as thick as a man's thigh at the base. Foliaceous lichens and a few mosses appeared at 2000 feet. Such is the vegetation of the roads through the tropical forests of the Outer-Himalaya.
This may be the more safely inferred, as in young and unhealthy specimens of other tendril-bearing plants similar rudiments may occasionally be observed. In the bean these filaments are variable in shape, as is so frequently the case with rudimentary organs; they are either cylindrical, or foliaceous, or are deeply furrowed on the upper surface.
The books will tell you that these bats are distinguished by "complicated nasal appendages consisting of foliaceous skin processes around the nostrils," which is quite true and utterly futile. It may do for a dried skin or a specimen in spirits of wine. I have had the foul fiend in a cage and looked him in the face.
The latter minute animals, provided with six pairs of foliaceous feet, which chiefly belong to the fresh waters, and are diffused under similar forms over the whole world, quit the egg with their full number of limbs. "Therefore," says he, "I regard Nebalia as a Phyllopodiform Decapod."
I shall mention some particulars. I have one specimen, in which the primary crystals are siliceous, the secondary thin foliaceous crystals of deep red but transparent iron-ore, forming elegant figures, that have the form of roses. The tertiary crystallization is a frosting of small siliceous crystals upon the edges of the foliaceous crystals.
I know of nothing more purgative of winter fumes and indigestions. It convinces me that Earth is still in her swaddling-clothes, and stretches forth baby fingers on every side. Fresh curls spring from the baldest brow. There is nothing inorganic. These foliaceous heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace, showing that Nature is "in full blast" within.
I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body. You find thus in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it.
They have not retained any vestige of the power of revolving. It is a curious fact, that many of these filaments, when foliaceous, have on their lower surfaces, dark-coloured glands like those on the stipules, which excrete a sweet fluid; so that these rudiments have been feebly utilized. One other analogous case, though hypothetical, is worth giving.
So close was this resemblance, that a native Dyak maintained that the foliaceous excrescences were really moss. Insects are preyed on by birds and other enemies whose sight is probably sharper than ours, and every grade in resemblance which aided an insect to escape notice or detection, would tend towards its preservation; and the more perfect the resemblance so much the better for the insect.
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