45 
no sooner tasted the water than I spit it out with disgust. Who 
could drink brine ? 
All the pools and rivulets which occur in this region absorb 
more or less soda from the soil, which seems everywhere impreg- . 
nated with this mineral. Luckily we carried with our lunch a 
bottle of the condensed water used in Caldera, or we should have 
been unable to quench our thirst. For this disappointment I 
was consoled by finding a number of beautiful flowering plants 
among the boulders that filled the ravine. 
The most attractive of the plants were a very handsome species 
of Alstremeria, which exhibited great lilac flowers, the petals 
streaked with blue veins and yellow blotches, and a tall Centaurea 
with white heads as gay looking as those of our Ox-eye daisy. 
A shrubby Euphorbia, five or six feet in height, with large white 
flowers, was abundant. This plant possesses a copious milky 
juice which pours from every wound made in its stem or leaves, 
and from this property is popularly called Lechero (milkman) and 
hence has been named by Philippi &. /actiflua. A pretty Stachys 
peeped from under the rocks whose shade it loves, and a broad- 
leaved, clammy MVicotiana and a Solanum, heavily laden with 
trusses of bright purple blossoms grew in more sunny spots. In 
this vicinity also flourishes a flower greatly coveted by the inhabi- 
tants of Caldera and called by them Afuna (Habranthus anuna 
Phil.). It springs from a bulb of the size of an onion and bears 
at the summit of a tall scape a cluster of yellow tubular blossoms. 
The most charming of all the plants collected in this quarter isa 
Tropacolum (T. tricolor, Lind.) a delicate vine which climbs upon 
shrubs in thick masses, profusely decorated with spurred corollas 
whose bright tints of orange, red and blue offer a standing invita- 
tion to all the humming birds that live in the vicinity. 
A few days after returning from this excursion, I made 
another in the company of a friend to a craggy hill known as the 
Morro, some ten miles south of Caldera. Morro is a Spanish 
word denoting any object that is round and over-hanging, and is 
applied on the coast to high rounded promontories that project 
into the ocean. Our route to this promontory lay by the seaside, 
around a lovely bay and across a beach two or three miles in ex- 
tent, which at low tide is as smooth and hard as a floor. So 
