men spend most of their time in fishing, sell ing what they do not require themselves, and getting drunk with the most exemplary regularity on cashaça, purchased with the proceeds.

I made, in this second visit to Villa Nova, an extensive collection of the natural productions of the neighborhood. A few remarks on some of the more interesting of these must suffice. The forests are very different in their general character from those of Pará, and in fact those of humid districts generally throughout the Amazons. The same scarcity of large-leaved Musaceous and Marantaceous plants was noticeable here as at Obydos. The low-lying areas of forest or Ygapós, which alternate everywhere with the more elevated districts, did not furnish the same luxuriant vegetation as they do in the Delta region of the Amazons. They are flooded during three or four months in the year, and when the waters retire, the soil-to which the very thin coating of alluvial deposit imparts little fertility-remains bare, or covered with a matted bed of dead leaves, until the next flood season. These tracts have then a barren appearance; the trunks and lower branches of the trees are coated with dried slime, and disfigured by rounded masses of fresh water sponges, whose long horny spicule and dingy colors give them the appearance of hedgehogs. Dense bushes of a harsh, cutting grass, called Tiririca, form almost the only fresh vegetation in the dry season. Perhaps the dense shade, the long period during which the land remains under water, and the excessively rapid desiccation when the waters retire, all contribute to the barrenness of these Ygapós. The higher and drier land is everywhere sandy, and tall coarse grasses line the borders of the broad alleys which have been cut through the second-growth woods. These places Swarm with carapátos, ugly ticks belonging to the genus Ixodes, which mount to the tips of blades of grass, and attach themselves to the clothes of passers-by. They are a great annoyance. It occupied me a full hour daily to pick them off my flesh after my diurnal ramble. There are two species; both are much flattened in shape, have four pairs of legs, a thick, short proboscis, and a horny integument. Their habit is to attach them selves to the skin by plunging their proboscides into it, and then suck the blood until their flat bodies are distended into a globular form. The whole proceeding, however, is very slow, and it takes them several days to pump their fill. No pain or itching is felt, but serious sores are caused if care is not taken in removing them, as the proboscis is liable o break off and remain in the wound. A little tobacco-juice is generally applied to make them loosen their hold. They do not cling firmly to the skin by their legs, although each of these has a pair of sharp and fine claws, connected with the tips of the member by means of a flexible pedicle. When they mount to the summits of slender blades of grass, or the tips of leaves, they hold on

by their fore-legs only, the other three pairs being stretched out so as to fasten on any animal which comes in their way. The smaller of the two species is of a yellowish color; it is much the most abundant, and sometimes falls upon one by scores. When distended, it is about the size of a No. 8 shot; the larger kind, which fortunately comes only singly to the work, swells to the size of a pea.

In some parts of the interior the soil is composed of very coarse sand and small fragments of quartz; in these places no trees grow. I visited, in company with the priest, Padre Torquato, one of these treeless spaces or campos, as they are called, situated five miles from the village. The road thither led through a varied and beautiful forest, containing many gigantic trees. I missed the Assai, Mirití, Paxiúba, and other palins which are all found only on rich moist soils, but the noble Bacába was not uncommon, and there was a great diversity of dwarf species of Marajá palms (Bactris), one of which called the Peuriríma, was very elegant, growing to a height of twelve or fifteen feet, with a stem no thicker than a man's finger. On arriving at the campo all this beautiful forest abruptly ceased, and we saw before us an oval tract of land, three or four miles in circumference, destitute even of the smallest bush. The only vegetation was a crop of coarse hairy grass growing in patches. The forest formed a hedge all round the isolated field, and its borders were composed in great part of trees which do not grow in the dense virgin forest, such as a great variety of bushy Melastomas, low Byrsumina trees, myrtles, and Lacre trees, whose berries exude globules of wax resembling gamboge. On the margins of the campo wild pineapples also grew in great quantity. The fruit was of the same shape as out cultivated kind, but much smaller, the size being that of a moderately large apple. We gathered several quite ripe; they were pleasant to the taste, of the true pineapple flavor, but had an abundance of fully developed seeds, and only a small quantity of eatable pulp. There was no path beyond this campo; in fact, all beyond is terra incognita to the inhabitants of Villa Nova.

The only interesting mammalian animal which I saw at Villa Nova was a monkey of a species new to me it was not, however, a native of the district, having been brought by a trader from the river Madeira, a few miles above Borba. It was a howler, proba bly the Mycetes stramineus of Geoffroy St. Hilaire. The howlers are the only kinds of monkey which the natives have not succeeded in taming. They are often caught, but they do not survive captivity many weeks. The one of which I am speaking was not quite full grown. It measured sixteen inches in length, exclusive of the tail; the whole body was covered with rather long and shining dingy-white hair, the whiskers and beard ouly being of a tawny hue. It was kept in a house, together with a Coaita and a Caiarára monkey (Cebus albifrons). Both these lively

members of the monkey order seemed rather to court attention, but the Mycetes slunk away when any one approached it. When it first arrived, it occasionally made a gruff subdued howling noise early in the morning. The deep volume of sound in the voice of the howling monkeys, as is well known, is produced by a drum-shaped expansion of the larynx. It was curious to watch the animal while venting its hollow cavernous roar, and observe how small was the muscular exertion employed. When howlers are seen in the forest, there are generally three or four of them mounted on the topmost branches of a tree. It does not appear that their harrowing roar is emitted from sudden alarm; at least, it was not so in captive individuals. It is probable, however, that the noise serves to intimidate their enemies. I did not meet with the Mycetes stramineus in any other part of the Amazons region; in the neighborhood of Pará a reddish-colored species prevails (M. Belzebuth); in the narrow channels near Breves I shot a large, entirely black kind; another yellow-handed species, according to the report of the natives, inhabits the island of Macajó, which is probably the M. flavimanus of Kuhl; some distance up the Tapajos the only howler found is a brownish black species; and on the Upper Amazons the sole species seen was the Mycetes ursinus, whose fur is of a shining yellowish-red color. In the dry forests of Villa Nova I saw a rattlesnake for the first time. I was returning home one day through a narrow alley, when I heard a pattering noise close to me. Hard by was a talm palm-tree, whose head was heavily weighted with parasitic plants, and I thought the noise was a warning that it was about to fall. The wind lulled for a few moments, and then there was no doubt that the noise proceeded from the ground. On turning my head in that direction, a sudden plunge startled me, and a heavy gliding motion betrayed a large serpent making off almost from beneath my feet. The ground is always so incumbered with rotting leaves and branches that one only discovers snakes when they are in the act of moving away. The residents of Villa Nova would not believe that I had seen a rattlesnake in their neigh borhood; in fact, it is not known to occur in the forests at all, its place being the open campos, where, near Santarem, I killed several. On my second visit to Villa Nova I saw another. I had then a favorite little dog, named Diamante, who used to accompany me in my rambles. One day he rushed into the thicket, and made a dead set at a large snake, whose head I saw raised above the herbage. The foolish little brute approached quite close, and then the serpent reared its tail slightly in a horizontal position and shook its terrible rattle. It was many minutes before I could get the dog away; and this incident, as well as the one already related, shows how slow the reptile is to make the fatal spring.

I was much annoyed, and at the same time amused, with the Urubú vultures. The Por

tuguese call them corvos or crows in color and general appearance they somewhat resemble rooks, but they are much larger, and have naked, black, wrinkled skin about their face and throat. They assemble in great numbers in the villages about the end of the wet season, and are then ravenous with hunger. My cook could not leave the open kitchen at the back of the house for a moment, while the dinner was cooking, on ac count of their thievish propensities. Someof them were always loitering about, watch ing their opportunity, and the instant the kitchen was left unguarded the bold marauders marched in and lifted the lids of the saucepans with their heaks to rob them of their contents. The boys of the village lie in wait and shoot them with bow and arrow; and vultures have consequently acquired such a dread of these weapons that they may be often kept off by hanging a bow from the rafters of the kitchen. As the dry season advances the hosts of Urubús follow the fishermen to the lakes, where they gorge themselves with the offal of the fisheries. Toward February they return to the villages, and are then not nearly so ravenous as before their summer trips.

The insects of Villa Nova are, to a great extent, the same as those of Santarem and the Tapajos. A few species of all orders, however, are found here, which occurred no where else on the Amazons, besides several others which are properly considered local varieties or races of others found at Pará, on the northern shore of the Amazons, or in other parts of tropical America. The Hymenoptera were especially numerous, as they always are in districts which possess a sandy soil; but the many interesting facts which 1 gleaned relative to their habits will be more conveniently introduced when I treat of the same or similar species found in the localities above named. In the broad alleys of the forest several species of Morpho were common. One of these is a sister form to the Morpho Ilecuba, which I have mentioned as occurring at Obydos. The Villa Nova kind differs from Hecuba suficiently to be considered a distinct species, and has been described under the name of M. Cisseis; but it is clearly only a local variety of it, the range of the two being limited by the barrier of the broad Amazons. It is a grand sight to see these colossal butterflies by twos and threes floating at a great height in the still air of a tropical morning. They flap their wings only at long intervals, for I have noticed them to sail a very considerable distance without a stroke. Their wing-muscles, and the thorax to which they are attached, very feeble in companion with the wide extent and weight of the wings; but the large expanse of these members doubtless assists the insects in maintaining their aërial course. Morphos are among the most conspicuous of the insect denizens of tropical American for ests, and the broad glades of the Villa Nova woods seemed especially suited to them, for I noticed here six species. The largest speci

To resume our voyage. We left Villa Nova on the 4th of December. A light wind on the 5th carried us across to the opposite shore and past the mouth of the Paraná mirim do arco, or the little river of the bow, so called on account of its being a short arm of the main river, of a curved shape, rejoining the Amazons a little below Villa Nova. On the 6th, after passing a large island in mid-river, we arrived at a place where a line of perpendicular clay cliffs, called the Barreiros de Cararaucú, diverts slightly the course of the main stream, as at Obydos. A little below these cliffs were a few settlers' houses: here Penna remained ten days to trade, a delay which I turned to good account in augmenting very considerably my collections.

At the first house a festival was going forward. We anchored at some distance from the shore, on account of the water being shoaly, and early in the morning three canoes put off, laden with sult fish, oil of manatee, fowls, and bananas, wares which the owners wished to exchange for different articles required for the festa. Soon after I went ashore. The head man was a tall, wellmade civilized Tapuyo, named Marcellino, who, with his wife, a thin, active, wiry old aquaw, did the honors of their house, I thought, admirably. The company consisted of fifty or sixty Indians and mamelucos; some of them knew Portuguese, but the Tupi language was the only one used among themselves. The festival was in honor of our Lady of Conception; and when the people learned that Penna had on beard an image of the saint handsomer than their own, they put off in their canoes to borrow it; Marcellino taking charge of the doll, covering it carefully with a neatly-bordered white towel. On landing with the image, a procession was formed from the port to the house, and salutes fired from a couple of lazariuo guns, the saint being afterward carefully deposited in the family oratorio. After a litany and hymn were sung in the evening, all assemb'ed to supper around a large mat spread on a smooth terrace-like space in front of the house. The meal consisted of a large boiled Pharecú, which had been harpooned for the purpose in the morning, stewed and roasted turtle, piles of maudioca-meal, and bananas. The old lady, with two young girls, showed the greatest activity in waiting on the guests, Marcellino standing gravely by, observing what was wanted, and giving the necessary orders to his wife. When all was done, hard drinking began, and soon after there was a dance, to which Penna and I were invited. The liquor served was chiefly a spirit distilled by the people themselves from mandioca cakes. The dances were all of the

We visited all the houses one after the other. One of them was situated in a charming spot, with a broad sandy beach before it, at the entrance to the Paraná-mirím do Mucámbo, a channel leading to an interior lake, peopled by savages of the Múra tribe. This seemed to be the abode of an industrious family, but all the men were absent, salting Pirarecú on the lakes. The house, like its neighbors, was simply a framework of poles thatched with palm-leaves, the walls roughly latticed and plastered with mud; but it was larger, and much cleaner inside than the others. It was full of women and children, who were busy all day with their various employments: some weaving hammocks in a large clumsy frame, which held the warp while the shuttle was passed by the hand slowly across the six feet breadth of web; others spinning cotton, and others again scraping, pressing, and roasting mandioca, The family had cleared and cultivated a large piece of ground; the soil was of extraordinary richness, the perpendicular banks of the river, near the house, revealing a depth of many feet of crumbling vegetable mould. There was a large plantation of tobacco, besides the usual patches of Indian corn, sugar-cane, and mandioca; and grove of cotton, cacao, coffee and fruit trees surrounded the house. We passed two nights at anchor in shoaly water off the beach. The weather was most beautiful, and scores of dolphins rolled and snorted about the canoe all night.

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We crossed the river at this point, and entered a narrow channel which penetrates the interior of the island of Tupinambarána, and leads to a chain of lakes called the Lagos de Cararaucú. A furious current swept along the coast, eating into the crumbling earthy banks, and strewing the river with débris of the forest. The mouth of the channel lies about twenty-five miles from Villa Nova; the entrance is only about forty yards broad, but it expands, a short distance inland, into a large sheet of water. We suffered terribly from insect pests during the twenty-four hours we remained here. At night it was quite impossible to sleep for mosquitoes; they fell upon us by myriads, and without much piping came straight at our faces as thick as raindrops in a shower. The men crowded into the cabins, and then tried to expel the pests by the smoke from burned rags, but it was of little avail, although we were half suffocated during the operation. In the daytime the Motúca, a much larger and more formidable fly than the mosquito, insisted upon levying his tax of blood. had been tormented by it for many days past,

We

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but this place seemed to be its metropolis. The species has been described by Perty, the author of the Entomological portion of Spix and Martius' travels, under the name of Hadrus lepidotus. It is a member of the Tabanidae family, and indeed is closely related to the Hæmatopota pluvialis, a brown fly which haunts the borders of woods in summer time in England. The Motúca is of bronzed-black color; its proboscis is formed of a bundle of horny lancets, which are shorter and broader than is usually the case in the family to which it belongs. Its puncture does not produce much pain, but it makes such a large gash in the flesh that the blood trickles forth in little streams. Many scores of them were flying about the canoe all day, and sometimes eight or ten would settle on one's ankles at the same time. It is sluggish in its motions, and may be easily killed with the fingers when it settles. Penna went forward in the montaria to the Pirarecú fishing stations, on a lake lying further inland; but he did not succeed in reach ing them on account of the length and intricacy of the channels; so after wasting a day, during which, however, I had a profitable ramble in the forest, we again crossed the river, and on the 16th continued our voyage along the northern shore.

The clay cliffs of Cararaucú are several miles in length. The hard pink-and-redcolored beds are here extremely thick, and in some places present a compact stony texture. The total height of the cliff is from thirty to sixty feet above the mean level of the river, and the clay rests on strata of the same coarse iron-cemented conglomerate which has already been so often mentioned. Large blocks of this latter have been detached and rolled by the force of currents up parts of the cliff, where they are seen resting on terraces of the clay. On the top of all lies a bed of sand and vegetable mould, which supports a lofty forest, growing up to the very brink of the precipice. After passing the e barreiros we continued our way along a low uninhabited coast, clothed, wherever it was elevated above high-water mark, with the usual vividly-colored forests of the higher Ygapó lands, to which the broad and regular fronds of the Murumurú palm, here extremely abundant, served as a great decoration. Wherever the land was lower than the flood height of the Amazons, Cecropia trees prevailed, sometimes scattered over meadows of tall broad-leaved grasses, which surrounded shallow pools swarming with water-fowl. Alligators were common on most parts of the coast; in some places we saw also small herds of Capybaras (a large Rodent animal, like a colossal Guinea-pig) among the rank herbage on muddy banks, and now and then flocks of the graceful squirrel monkey (Chrysothrix sciureus), and the vivacious Caiarára (Cebus albifrons) were seen taking flying leaps from tree to tree. On the 220 we pass ed the mouth of the most easterly of the numerous channels which lead to the large in terior lake of Saracá, and on the 23d threaded

à series of passages between islands, where we again saw human habitations, ninety miles distant from the last house at Cararaucú. On the 24th we arrived at Serpa.

Serpa is a small village, consisting of about eighty houses, built on a bank elevated twenty-five feet above the level of the river. The beds of Tabatinga clay, which are here intermingled with scoria-looking conglomerate, are in some parts of the declivity prettily variegated in color; the name of the town iu the Tupí language, Ita-coatiára, takes its origin from this circumstance, signifying striped or painted rock. It is an old settlement, and was once the seat of the district government, which had authority over the Barra of the Rio Negro. It was in 1849 a wretchedlooking village, but it has since revived, on account of having been chosen by the Steamboat Company of the Amazons as a station for steam saw-mills and tile manufactories. We arrived on Christmas-eve, when the village presented an animated appearance from the number of people congregated for the holidays. The port was full of canoes, large and small-from the montaria, with its arched awning of woven lianas and arautaleaves, to the two-masted cuberta of the peddling trader, who had resorted to the place in the hope of trafficking with settlers coming from remote sitios to attend the festival. We anchored close to an igarité, whose owner was an old Jurí Indian, disfigured by a large black tattooed patch in the middle of his face, and by his hair being close cropped, except a fringe in front of the head. In the afternoon we went ashore. The population seemed to consist chiefly of semi-civilized Indians, living as usual in half-finished mud hovels. The streets were irregularly laid out, and overrun with weeds and bushes swarming with " mocuim,' a very minute scarlet acarus, which sweeps off to one's clothes in passing, and attaching itself in great numbers to the skin causes a most disagreeable itching. The few whites and better class of mameluco residents live in more substantial dwellings, whitewashed and tiled. All, both men and women, seemed to me much more cordial, and at the same time more brusque in their manners than any Brazilians I had yet met with. One of them, Captain Manoel Joaquim, I knew for a long time afterward; a lively, intelligent, and thoroughly good-hearted man, who had quite a reputation throughout the interior of the country for generosity, and for being a firm friend of foreign residents and stray travellers. Some of these excellent people were men of substance, being owners of trading vessels, slaves, and extensive plantations of cacao and tobacco.

We stayed at Serpa five days. Some of the ceremonies observed at Christmas were interesting, inasmuch as they were the same, with little modification, as those taught by the Jesuit missionaries more than a century ago, to the aboriginal tribes whom they had induced to settle on this spot. In the morning all the women and girls, dressed in white