Excerpt from The Amazon and Madeira Rivers: Sketches and Descriptions From the Note-Book of an Explorer If trees of the dimensions of that represented here are not found in all tropical forests, they are not a rare sight in the rich alluvion of the Amazon Basin. They generally belong to the ficus family, with light white wood. A halt in the cool shade of such a giant, covered with hundreds of parasitic plants, from the broad-leaved imbe with its rope-like roots to strange orchids and graceful ferns, when the mid-day sun fills the atmosphere around with its glowing rays, is quite a treat after a morning's hard work. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.