FLORA OF BRAZIL 161 
gers, difficulties, and privations, as were enough to have 
deterred me from undertaking it, could I have foreseen them 
previously to leaving the coasts. 
Proceeding in a S.W. direction, through a flat country, at 
first covered with Palm forests, and then consisting of arid, 
sandy Campos, or thin woods of low deciduous trees, a slow 
journey of about three hundred miles brought me to a flat 
mountain-chain, being the N.E. branch of the Serra Geral, 
which runs from S. to N. through Central Brazil. Making 
the small town of Crato, situated at the bottom of the east- 
ern side of this range, my head-quarters, I remained in its 
neighbourhood nearly five months, and acquired an herba- 
rium of about six hundred species of plants. I would not 
have stopped here so long, particularly as the people were a 
most barbarous set among whom I lived, but the desert 
country to the westward cannot be traversed till the rains 
have set in. 'The wet season ending much earlier in the 
interior than on the coast, my journey to Crato was less 
productive than I had anticipated ; the herbaceous vegeta- 
tion, in particular, being almost entirely dried up. I only 
saw enough to convince me that fine collections could have 
been made, had I gone over the same ground two months 
earlier, 
At Crato, I was so fortunate as to be able to engage a 
young Englishman, who had travelled a good deal in the 
interior, to accompany me as an assistant, and having dis- 
patched my collections to the coast, we started, in the begin- 
ning of February, 1839, for Oeiras, the capital of the province 
of Piauhy, distant about four hundred and fifty miles, in a 
westerly direction. The rains had now set in about a fort- 
night, and the whole face of the country was verdant and 
flowery. It is quite astonishing with what rapidity vegeta- 
tion takes place in these deserts, after the first few showers 
have fallen. The annual grasses spring up through the white 
sand, the trees burst into leaf and bloom, and the perennial 
herbaceous plants, which during the drought were apparently 
destroyed, throw up their flowering stems in an incredibly 
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