Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Vanda Lowii
The forests abound with gigantic trees with cylindrical, buttressed, or furrowed stems,
while occasionally the traveller comes upon a wonderful fig-tree, whose trunk is itself a
forest of stems and aërial roots. Still more rarely are found trees which appear to have begun
growing in mid-air, and from the same point send out wide-spreading branches above and a
complicated pyramid of roots descending for seventy or eighty feet to the ground below, and
so spreading on every side, that one can stand in the very centre with the trunk of the tree
immediately overhead. Trees of this character are found all over the Archipelago, and the
accompanying illustration (taken from one which I often visited in the Aru Islands) will
convey some idea of their general character. I believe that they originate as parasites, from
seeds carried by birds and dropped in the fork of some lofty tree. Hence descend aërial
roots, clasping and ultimately destroying the supporting tree, which is in time entirely re-
placed by the humble plant which was at first dependent upon it. Thus we have an actual
struggle for life in the vegetable kingdom, not less fatal to the vanquished than the struggles
among animals which we can so much more easily observe and understand. The advantage
of quicker access to light and warmth and air, which is gained in one way by climbing
plants, is here obtained by a forest tree, which has the means of starting in life at an eleva-
tion which others can only attain after many years of growth, and then only when the fall of
some other tree has made room for them. Thus it is that in the warm and moist and equable
climate of the tropics, each available station is seized upon, and becomes the means of de-
veloping new forms of life especially adapted to occupy it.
