"Urwald" by R. H. Francé is a natural history travelogue written in the early 20th century. It blends clear ecological explanation with vivid firsthand impressions to depict tropical forests worldwide while correcting romantic clichés about “primeval jungle.” Readers can expect a tour of rainforest types, their plant–animal communities, and the lived experience of field travel across Ceylon/India, Australia, the South Seas, and the Americas.The opening of the work recounts the author’s first landfall in Ceylon after years of book-fed longing, his realization that reality overturns clichés, and his intent to offer a lived portrait of tropical forests. He maps where true wilderness remains—above all the Amazon—and distinguishes major forest forms: ever-wet rainforest, riverine gallery forest, tidal mangrove, seasonally dry forests with park-like “campinas,” and the Australian scrub. He separates features common to any primeval forest from distinctly tropical adaptations (colorful and glossy leaves, drip-tips, air roots, swift decay, giant growth) and notes regional contrasts; the tropics also shelter many ancient lineages. In Ceylon/India he evokes broken canopies, magical half-light, rainbursts, and a riot of epiphytes, lianas, orchids, and ferns, alongside hazards such as leeches and thorny rattan; elephants, he notes, create light-gaps that renew the forest. He stresses many vertical layers and extreme tree diversity, with banyans forming living colonnades. Turning to Austra…
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