In the Philippines vegetation is singularly favoured by the humidity of the climate and the elevation of the temperature, so that the Flora of these richly-endowed islands displays a prodigious variety. Not a single family of tropical plants but is here represented by several species. Hill and valley and plain alike are characterized by the exuberant growth of leaf and fruit and flower; the graceful forms might have enchanted an ancient Greek, the wealth of glowing and intense colour would have fired the imagination of Turner, and defied the palette of Titian or Tintoretto. There are landscapes of such beauty and fertility as the fancy of artist or poet never conceived. Ferns and Orchids are, perhaps, even more abundant here than in the forests of Java, Borneo, or Sumatra. The Bamboo attains to unusual proportions; the Areca (Areca catechu) raises to the sky its tall shapely stem, crested with plume-like leaves; and the Betel-nut tree supplies in profusion the grains which, mixed with the fruits of the gigantic palm, constitute the Pinangue; a kind of quid, which the Orientals chew delightedly, and to which they attribute very valuable stomachic and digestive properties. Under the dense shade of the great forests we are amazed by untold numbers of various kinds of plants, all adorned by richly coloured leaves, which invest the scene with a singular charm, nay, with something of a fairy character; and amongst these we single out the Dracæna terminalis, with its blood-empurpled foliage, which, recently introduced into Europe, has already become one of the greatest ornaments of our parks and gardens.
I have previously had occasion to remark the singularity of character which in Australia distinguishes almost every member either of the vegetable or the animal kingdom. I have already said that this immense island-continent seems to have been the chosen theatre for a distinct creative display, where every type differs from the representatives of our scientific classifications in other parts of the globe. The reader has been able to form some idea of the fancifulness of the vegetable forms peculiar to the Australian savannahs. Nor are those which constitute the so-called forests less strangely fantastic. On the southern coast, which is the coolest, the forests are of very moderate extent. In fact, they may be more correctly described as enormous thickets scattered in tolerably sheltered localities. Most of the trees which compose them have trunks of great feebleness compared with their height, which is often prodigious, and they do not begin to ramify until near their summits. Their bark is smooth, and usually of a grayish-white. Of all their species it can only be said that two—the Stadmannia austral and the Alectryon—bear fruit which men can eat even under the pressure of hunger. Finally—and this without doubt is the most singular feature of a truly exceptional vegetation—while all the trees and herbaceous plants of the Old and New Worlds develop their leaves horizontally, or on a plane tangent to the cylindrical surface of the trunk or stem, in Australia the leaves of the trees are disposed vertically; in such wise that they give scarcely any shade, and yet are themselves exposed in the very slightest degree to the action of the solar rays. It is owing to this latter circumstance they are always weakly coloured; and thus they give to the densest forests and the most robust trees a sickly tint, a sort of pallor of disease, which saddens the gaze accustomed to the varied tones and vivid hues of the verdure of tropical forests, or to the bold contrasts of light and shade exhibited by the woods of Europe and North America.
The Australian species are comprised in a small number of families, notably in those of the Coniferæ and Myrtaceæ. Certain forests are wholly composed of Casuarinas; others, of Acacias; others again, of Eucalypti. Some of the latter trees may be ranged among the greatest with which botanists are acquainted. The Blue Gum (Eucalyptus globulus) attains, for instance, the extraordinary stature of upwards of 300 feet, and does not send out a single branch until half this distance from the ground. Its upright cylindrical trunk furnishes a timber much appreciated by ship-wrights, and especially makes admirable masts. The Eucalypti secrete in abundance a white, sugary, and aromatic substance; whence they derive their popular name of “gum trees”—a name which is also bestowed very frequently upon the gum-bearing Acacias.
The family of Coniferæ exhibit themselves in Australia, like every other group of plants, under strange and novel forms. The shape of those trees is generally fusiform and pyramidal; their leaves are sometimes extraordinarily small, sometimes large and flattened. Many are of great size; none, however, attaining the gigantic proportions of the celebrated columnar Pine of New Caledonia, which Cook’s companions mistook for a colossal mass of basaltic pillars, and which Moore, like a true son of industrious Albion, compared to an enormous factory-chimney. This tree exceeds 160 feet in height, and its ramifications, all of the same height, radiate regularly around its trunk, from the base even to the summit.
I have now to ask the reader’s companionship on an excursion into the forests of the great African island of Madagascar. The insalubrity of the climate and the jealous inhospitality of the inhabitants will not permit us to penetrate far into their luxuriant depths; but the most superficial glance will satisfy us upon their wild magnificence and the original variety of their superb flora.[167]
We should seek in vain among their leafy, blossoming glades, for the famous Manchineal, a member of the American Euphorbiaceæ, which holds a high place in the records of vegetable poisons; but the toxicological amateur will find ample compensation in examining the formidable Tanghin,[168] whose deadly juice, mixed with some other substances, plays an important part in the judicial ordeals popular among the Malagasy.