Note 61 — Chapter VI · THE CARBONIFEROUS SYSTEM.

This may seem strange at first; but I have journeyed through tropical forests that realized completely this sketch, so far as stillness and silence are concerned. A modern and most accomplished naturalist says of a Jamaica virgin forest, “Animal life is almost unseen; the solitude is scarcely broken by the voices of birds, except that now and then the rain-bird or the hunter (large cat-tailed cuckoos that love the shade) sound their startling rattle, or the mountain partridge utters those mournful cooings which are like the moans of a dying man.”—Gosse’s Jamaica, p. 198.