Ensete, a wild banana, grows luxuriantly up to about

Fig. 63.-Musa Ensete, a wild Banana.

6000 feet and down to 3000 feet, or a little lower if

there is water. It is also met with in the Taveitan forest at the base of Kilima-njaro. It seems to be in fruit at all seasons of the year, but the bunch here illustrated was cut in September. The colour of the ripe fruit is a pale orange. The length about 3 inches. Inside there are varying rows of seeds, from two to five or more, and in each row there may be either two, three, four, five, six, or seven seeds. Each seed is irregularly shaped, about inch in diameter, and very black. The pulp which surrounds and closely adheres to the seeds is orange in colour, when fresh, and somewhat pithy in texture, although very glutinous. The inside of the seeds is a friable white pith, easily rubbed into a white powder by the natives. When in this state it is used for divinations and augury. Blown from the palm of the hand into the air, its capricious wafting by the breeze is supposed to indicate the direction of an expected attack during war, or the most favourable quarter in which to travel for commerce. The thin pulp of this fruit is just eatable; faintly sweet, but leaving a somewhat acrid taste in the mouth like an unripe banana of the cultivated species. Its structure is somewhat curious, for it is composed of long veins at wide intervals, and in between are thin delicate lines running at right angles. It is supposed by the natives that children grow up fine and tall if they eat the pulp of Musa Ensete. The natives recognize its relationship to the cultivated banana.

At a height of 7000 to 8000 feet tree-ferns may be met with, belonging to the species Lonchitis pubescens (illustrated on p.231). Then above that the arborescent heaths begin to appear, and the orchilla lichen covers nearly all the forest with a grey-green veil. Between This belief also prevails in the Nyassa region.

8000 and 9000 feet the giant Senecios are met with (a new species, illustrated in Chapter XIII.), and continue upwards till near the borders of the snow. Gorgeous crimson gladioli, pale pink and mauve and cerulean blue irises, grow to great altitudes; indeed, some of the flowers of the grassy uplands between

10,000 and 14,000 feet, are particularly brilliant in colour. There are vivid blue cynoglossums, the blushpink everlastings, the yellow euryops, the strange straw-coloured proteas, with red bracts and red-leaf shoots, the smalt-coloured lobelias (L. Deckeni), and many others which it would be tedious to catalogue.

Ferns cease to be found at a greater altitude than 13,000 odd feet. The giant heaths above that altitude give place to smaller species, the vegetation generally becomes more and more stunted, and therefore the strange Senecios look the stranger from their towering in solitary grandeur above the lowly herbs. But after an altitude of 14,000 feet is passed they are also absent from the scene; then one is left with a few artemisias (southernwood), heaths, and everlasting flowers, until at length they too disappear, and there remain little red and greenish lichens, expanses of yellow sand, leadcoloured rocks, black boulders, and snow.

Taking into consideration the fact that the region of Kilima-njaro is volcanic, and therefore probably geologically modern, it must be evident that the main features of its vegetation are of no great antiquity. It is therefore an interesting problem as to which of the two floras-the South African or the Abyssinian

was the first to reach the chilly regions round its snow-clad peaks. It is also as yet an undecided question as to which flora is the advancing one; whether the Cape forms are slowly penetrating northward, some of them reaching Abyssinia, some of them arrested on the heights of Kilima-njaro, and marking a return flow of the vegetation (and possibly of the fauna also) of Southern Africa, or whether the great invasion of Northern forms which have so largely contributed in later epochs to the modern fauna and flora of Tropical Africa is still going on. Whilst Cape genera and species of plants penetrate to Abyssinia, Abyssinian forms have reached the Zambesi highlands and the Drakensberg Mountains.

The flora of the higher regions of Kilima-njaro is almost equally divided in its affinities between Abyssinia

and Cape Colony. There are besides, in the collections I have brought back, two new genera offering no near allies; types of other genera only known hitherto in Arabia or India; and some new species of East African genera that have apparently modified themselves for life at high altitudes. It is interesting to note that while some of the species whose generic home is in the hot tropical plains have strayed up the great mountain and got used to the cold, so others, which come from temperate regions, have ventured down the mountain and got used to the heat. A curious instance of this is Artemisia afra, which I have found at 14,000 feet near the snow, and at 3000 feet, in close proximity to the hot plains. If plants of temperate or cold climates could occasionally stray so far as this from the regions and the temperature they most affect, it would materially aid in their distribution, for the seeds of the Artemisia (this plant will be familiar to my non-scientific readers as "southernwood," or "old man") might easily be borne from the jungle at the base of Kilima-njaro to the precincts of Mount Meru, some thirty miles distant, and find on the chilly slopes of that mountain another congenial home and starting-place for a further colonization of unknown peaks beyond. Thus, taking into consideration the fact that more or less high ground connects the mountains of the Kilimanjaro district with the Cape Colony in the south and the Cameroons in the west, it is possible to account for

the

presence of many hardy genera belonging to temperate zones on the heights of Tropical Africa without always invoking special climatic changes and revolutions in the past.

To the ordinary mind even of an unreflecting tra