No Two Trees the Same

The Selva is the forested plain running west from the Amazon to the foot of the Andes, at least fifteen hundred miles across and, by the book's estimate, some six times the area of France. What the account finds most remarkable about it is not the size.

"It is composed of large trees of various sizes and heights, and what is very remarkable, they differ greatly in species; so that no two trees standing together are of the same kind." On a patch of twenty square yards you might count thirty or forty trees, every one of them a different species^[1].

The gaps between are filled with grass-trees and bushes and stitched together by climbing plants, until the whole becomes "a woody fabric... as impenetrable to man as a wall of stone, and more difficult to be removed."