In attempting to describe the vertical stratification of a forest ecosystem, author "J.S." launches into a five-page-long metaphor about hotels. Any chance of this metaphor being useful is annihilated by J.S.'s editorializing about the transience and implied sexual caprice of the hotel's tenants. What emerges, instead of an informative chapter about forests, is something that sounds like thinly-veiled autobiography about the emotional emptiness of life as a permanent hotel resident.
Both a forest and a hotel have different layers or floors, with some individuals living on certain floors, and others moving from floor to floor.
The most familiar area of a hotel is the first floor or lobby. This is also the busiest place in the building, for here pass all those going to higher or lower floors. Visitors rest in the lobby, and convention delegates greet one another there. The lobby of the forest is the surface of the ground, with its tree-to-tree carpeting of leaf litter.
Unlike a tidy hotel, there are many animals under the carpet of leaf litter in a forest lobby.
Above the lobby in most hotels is a mezzanine. This is usually an incomplete floor and may be used only part of the year for conventions and the like. The herbaceous layer of the forest may be compared to the mezzanine.
As people are not expected to stay always on the same floor in a hotel, so one does not expect species and individuals of animals to be found always in the same layer of the forest.
The middle floors of a hotel seem to have considerable use. Plenty of rooms are available at a reasonable cost. In a forest small trees make up a definite understory.
Where one stays in a hotel depends on the number of rooms and how much they cost. Where animals live in the forest depends greatly on where their food is most abundant, but other factors are important.
If little is known about the upper floors of a hotel, even less is known about life up in the penthouse. Few persons are ever invited there and if one goes he usually does not stay long. The penthouse of the forest is the canopy.
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