Nearly eighty inches of yearly rain and more than eighty degrees of perpetual heat make swift work with vegetable fibre, which, in our cold and sluggard clime, would curdle into leaf-mould, perhaps into peat.

Far to the north, in poor old Ireland, and far to the south, in Patagonia, begin the zones of peat, where dead vegetable fibre, its treasures of light and heat locked up, lies all but useless age after age.

But this is the zone of illimitable sun-force, which destroys as swiftly as it generates, and generates again as swiftly as it destroys.

Here, when the forest giant falls, as some tell me that they have heard him fall, on silent nights, when the cracking of the roots below and the lianes aloft rattles like musketry through the woods, till the great trunk comes down, with a boom as of a heavy gun, re-echoing on from mountain-side to mountain-side; then-- 'Nothing in him that doth fade, But doth suffer an _air_-change Into something rich and strange.' Under the genial rain and genial heat the timber tree itself, all its tangled ruin of lianes and parasites, and the boughs and leaves snapped off not only by the blow, but by the very wind, of the falling tree--all melt away swiftly and peacefully in a few months-- say almost a few days--into the water, and carbonic acid, and sunlight, out of which they were created at first, to be absorbed instantly by the green leaves around, and, transmuted into fresh forms of beauty, leave not a wrack behind.

Explained thus--and this I believe to be the true explanation--the absence of leaf-mould is one of the grandest, as it is one of the most startling, phenomena of the forest.
Look here at a fresh wonder.