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He loves again to behold the great tropical trees, the wild rush of torrents or hills and valleys cultivated by the hand of the labourer. The influence of the equinoctial climate, everywhere else so vivifying, is not felt in places where the great associations of gramina almost exclude every other plant.
The region of palm-trees, bananas and arborescent gramina extends far beyond the two tropics: but it would be dangerous to apply what has been observed at the extremity of the tropical zone to what may take place in the plains near the equator.
At liquidi fontes et stagna virentia musco Adsint, et tenuis fugiens per gramina rivus " And shall be surrounded with beds of violets and lavender and such blue flowers as bees especially love. When, Narcissus, I glance over the hedge at the back of the house and behold Captain Runacles' two acres lying waste, cumbered like a mining country with the ruins of his mechanical toys, I have a mind to "
Within the tropics, the strength and luxury of vegetation give such a development to plants, that the smallest of the dicotyledonous family become shrubs. It would seem as if the liliaceous plants, mingling with the gramina, assumed the place of the flowers of our meadows.
The Bambusa latifolia seems to be peculiar to the basins of the Upper Orinoco, the Cassiquiare, and the Amazon; it is a social plant, like all the gramina of the family of the nastoides; but in that part of Spanish Guiana which we traversed it does not grow in those large masses which the Spanish Americans call guadales, or forests of bamboos.
"Tempore, quo Caesar Româ, dominatus in altâ Aureolo jussit collum signare moniti; Ne depascentem quisquis me gramina laedat, Caesaris heu causâ, periturae parcere vitae." which has been thus literally translated in nearly the same words quoted by Ruris "When Julius Caesar reigned king, About my neck he put this ring, That whosoever did me take, Should spare my life for Caesar's sake."
This basin, like the plains of Lombardy, is open to the east. The latter occupy the space between the mountains of Parime and New Grenada. The two parts of this basin have an opposite direction; but being alike covered with gramina, they are usually comprehended in the country under the same denomination.
M. Bonpland fortunately found one in flower; a circumstance I mention, because the genera Nastus and Bambusa had before been very imperfectly distinguished, and nothing is more rare in the New World, than to see these gigantic gramina in flower.
The people confound this alpine scitamineous plant with the arborescent gramina, under the name of carice. We saw neither its fruit nor flowers. Wandering in this thick wood of musaceae or arborescent plants, we constantly directed our course towards the eastern peak, which we perceived from time to time through an opening.
It is the earliest grass of all our British species, being often in bloom in February. The above intelligent gentleman, who seems to have studied the British Gramina to a considerable extent, says that the following kinds give considerable food to sheep and cattle in such situations; I shall therefore mention their names, as being with us of little esteem and similar to the above. Phleum alpinum.
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