ON THE AMAZON. 247 
here give out abundance of milk, which, from its tenacity and hardness 
when dry, I suppose may one day come to be used like Gutta Percha. 
My specimens of the Leguminose, nos. 920 and 960, were gathered 
from young trees, and I now find that these two species are amongst 
the largest trees of the “ Gapó." I lately found on the leaves of 
no. 960, what I at first took for a new Rafflesiacea, and the resemblance 
to some Apodanthus is indeed most striking: it was only by careful 
examination that I satisfied myself it was really produced by an insect. 
The perianth (for such it seems) is green in the earliest stage, changing 
to pink, and afterwards to dull purple, tubular from an oval base, from 
one to two lines long, and the tube a third of a line broad, hairy within 
and without with spreading white hairs (though the leaves are nearly 
smooth), the mouth expanded, 2-5-lobed, sometimes dimidiate. Ovary 
inferior, 1-celled, with one or two pendulous ovules. But these ovules 
are the true eggs of an insect, for, by examining individuals in pro- 
gressive states of development, I have traced the formation from the 
egg of, first, a minute fusiform annulate body, and, ultimately, of a 
perfect insect with legs and wings. To make the resemblance to a 
flower more striking, there appears, beneath what I have called the 
perianth, what seems to be a calyx of four or five erect triangular 
brownish sepals ; but these are really only the torn cuticle by the pro- 
trusion of the perianth. : 
- To explain the form assumed by these excrescences, may we not 
suppose there has been an attempt to reproduce the tubular 5-lobed 
calyx of the species (which belongs either to Inga, or to some allied 
genus)? The juices of a plant, when diverted from their ordinary 
channels, must still go on forming tissue according to some law 
originally impressed on the species ; and I have seen modes of develop- 
ment follow the puncture of an insect, such as in general only long 
cultivation calls forth. On the same leaves were the nidi of another 
insect. These were scarcely a line long, globoso-urceolate, regularly — 
20-striate, containing eggs in the concavity as in the other. They 
might easily be mistaken for some epiphyllous fungus. I enclose spe- 
cimens of these productions, and I will afterwards send yon a larger 
species. : 
The eurious leaf-gall from the island of Cuba, figured on page 32 of 
Lindley's * Vegetable Kingdom,’ shows great resemblance to the flower — 
of Ochnacéæ, to which Natural Order the plant bearing it bel ges 
VOL. III. 2K 
