to a certain palm (surely the last to be thought
capable of parasite flexibility?) which we call
the Desmoncus, but the natives the Jacitára,
and which is a great nuisance in the forests,
because of the strong recurved spines at the
tips of the leaves, that catch off the hats and
tear the clothes of the unfortunate traveller not
mindful of his steps. The monkeys climb; there
are no groundlings as in the baboons and
orangoutangs of the Old World, but all are aboreal,
with long tails to help them at a pinch, flexible
at the tips and sometimes naked and sensitive
like a fifth hand; the gallinaceous birds, answering
to our cocks and hens and partridges and
pheasants, climb more than they fly, and perch
only on the highest parts of the trees; a
creature allied to the bear family, a genus of
"Plantigrade Carnivora," has a swinging length
of flexible tail like the monkeys, and climbs as
well as any of them; and the very ground
beetles of other countries have here changed
their natures, and live exclusively "up a tree"
like the rest.

In fact, the law seems to be that everything
shall climb, whatever its nature or habit; and
that everything shall try to overcome everything
else. Parasites sit as tufts on the crowns
of the high forest trees, circling the boughs
with radiant necklaces, or looping stem and
stem together—some in single strength, others
interlaced as chains, others again twined as
cables, and some indented and jagged; air-roots,
striving for nourishment, drop straight as plumb-
lines from the boughs, some bearing gracious
flowers and others lovely leaves, and all the
haunts of humming-birds, and beautiful moths,
and shining flies, and gem-like beetles. Sometimes
the parasite is mean and poor and
disfigures the tree where it hangs, and sometimes
it is rich in scarlet and white and purple and
yellow; and sometimes—as with the Sipó Matador,
or Murderer Liana—it kills its support and
foster-mother. This Murderer Liana is one of
the strangest of all. It springs up close to the
tree where it intends to fix itself, and its stem
grows by running over the trunk of its
supporter like a plastic mould of bark. Then it
puts forth, on each side, an arm-like branch
which looks like a great vein, or as if a " stream
of sap were flowing, and hardening as it went,"
and which flows on till each meets the other,
and the two veins become one. "These arms
are put forth at somewhat regular intervals in
mounting upwards, and the victim, when its
strangler is full grown, becomes tightly clasped
by a number of inflexible rings. These rings
gradually grow larger as the murderer flourishes,
rearing its crown of foliage to the sky mingled
with that of its neighbour, and in course of time
they kill it by stopping the flow of its sap. The
strange spectacle then remains of the selfish
parasite clasping in its arms the lifeless and
decaying body of its victim which had been a
help to its own growth. Its ends have been
served—it has flowered and fruited, reproduced
and disseminated its kind; and now when the
dead trunk moulders away, its own end
approaches; its support is gone, and itself also
falls."

Amongst the most curious of the many
curious facts which Mr. Bates has recorded, is
that of the bird-catching spider, Mygale
avicularia, so long held to be only a figment of
Madame Merian's own brain, and to have been
attested by M. Palisot de Beauvais, rather from
complaisance than from truth; but the existence
of which is now established without doubt, Mr.
Bates having seen with his own eyes what he
has related. He saw a large hairy spider,
nearly two inches in length of body but with
legs expanding to the length of seven inches,
and both body and legs covered with coarse
grey and reddish hairs;—he saw this monster
crouched on the body of a finch about the size
of an English siskin, which, smeared with a filthy
liquor, but not quite dead, still palpitated
beneath the fangs of the horrid brute. Another
finch lay on the bole dead; and the dense white
web stretched across a crevice in the tree, but
broken now and the birds entangled in the
pieces, told the whole story of the capture. The
mygales are called crab-spiders by the natives,
and if touched shed their hairs, causing a
peculiar and almost maddening irritation. They
are sometimes of immense size, and Mr. Bates
saw one of them with a cord round its waist,
led about the house by some Indian children,
as if it were a dog. Many of the spiders of the
country are of exquisite colours, and some,
which double themselves up at the base of leaf-
stalks, deceive their prey by thus looking like
flower-buds. One, a species of Acrosoma, has
two curved bronze-coloured spines, an inch and
a half in length, proceeding from the tip of its
abdomen: it spins a large web, its spines, so
far as can be seen, neither hindering nor helping
in the work. As for the webs, some are like
silk, and some like fine muslin; and some of
the dens are broad slanting galleries two feet
long, burrowed in the ground, others are nests
built in the trees, or hammocks slung across the
angles of a room, or hung up on the tiles and
thatch of the house-tops.

Then there are the ants; specially the Saüba
ant; that big-headed creature which thatches
its entrance-domes with leaves, thereby causing
most unsightly devastation to the best of the
cultivated trees. For the cunning little thief
will not touch a rough and ready forest tree of its
own country (sometimes, indeed, it will condescend
to a very young and tender native), but,
in general, attacks only the imported and
cultivated trees, as the coffee and orange trees. It
was wrong, though, to call the whole family of
the Saüba ant big-headed; it is only the warriors
which have those enormously swollen and massive
heads—highly polished, like a bit of Egyptian
granite or obsidian, in the Worker-major, but
opaque and hairy in the subterranean worker;
while the real worker, the Worker-minor,
who carries the leaves, and feeds the young,
and cleans the cells, and in fact does all
the useful domestic economy of the nation,
is an ordinary ant like any other, varying