They also saw the cactus and the palm, turned by the struggle for existence in this tremendous forest, into climbing plants.

Obed noted these facts with his sharp eye.
"It's funny that the cactus and the palm have to climb to live," he said, "but they've done it.

It isn't any funnier, however, than the fact that the whale lived on land millions of years ago, and had to take to the water to escape being eaten up by bigger and fiercer animals than himself.

I'm a Maine man and so I know about whales." They came now and then to little clearings, in which the peons raised many kinds of tropical and semitropical plants, bananas, pineapples, plantains, oranges, cocoa-nuts, mangoes, olives and numerous others.

In some places the fruit grew wild, and they helped themselves to it.