48 PARA. Cuap., III. 
dismal noise of wooden clappers, wielded by negroes stationed near the 
different churches. A sermon is delivered in each church. In the 
middle of it, a scroll is suddenly unfolded from the pulpit, on which is 
an exaggerated picture of the bleeding Christ. This act is accompanied 
by loud groans which come from stout-lunged individuals concealed in 
the vestry and engaged for the purpose. The priest becomes greatly 
excited, and actually sheds tears. On one of these occasions I squeezed 
myself into the crowd, and watched the effect of the spectacle on the 
audience. Old Portuguese men and Brazilian women seemed very 
much affected—sobbing, beating their breasts, and telling their beads. 
The negroes behaved themselves with great propriety, but seemed moved 
more particularly by the pomp, the gilding, the dresses, and the general 
display. Young Brazilians laughed. Several aborigines were there, 
coolly looking on. One old Indian, who was standing near me, said, 
in a derisive manner, when the sermon was over, “It’s all very good ; 
better it could not be ” (Esta todo bom ; melhor nad pude ser), 
The negroes of Pard are very devout. They have built, by slow degrees, 
a fine church, as I was told, by their own unaided exertions. It is called 
Nossa Senhora do Rosario, or Our Lady of the Rosary. During the 
first weeks of our residence at Parad, I frequently observed a line of 
negroes and negresses, late at night, marching along the streets, singing 
a chorus. Each carried on his or her head a quantity of building 
materials—stones, bricks, mortar, or planks. I found they were chiefly 
slaves, who, after their hard day’s work, were contributing a little towards 
the construction of their church. The materials had all been purchased 
by their own savings. The interior was finished about a year afterwards, 
and is decorated, I thought, quite as superbly as the other churches 
which were constructed, with far larger means, by the old religious 
orders more than a century ago. Annually, the negroes celebrate the 
festival of Nossa Senhora do Rosario, and generally make it a complete 
success. 
I will now add a few more notes which I have accumulated on the 
subject of the natural history ; and then we shall have done, for the 
present, with Pard and its neighbourhood. 
I have already mentioned that monkeys were rare in the immediate 
vicinity of Para. I met with three species only in the forest near the 
city; they are shy animals, and avoid the neighbourhood of towns, 
where they are subject to much persecution by the inhabitants, who kill 
them for food. The only kind which I saw frequently was the little 
Midas ursulus, one of the Marmosets, a family peculiar to tropical 
America, and differing in many essential points of structure and habits 
from all other apes. They are small in size, and more like squirrels 
than true monkeys in their manner of climbing. The nails, except 
those of the hind thumbs, are long and claw-shaped, like those of 
squirrels, and the thumbs of the fore extremities, or hands, are not 
opposable to the other fingers. I do not mean to convey that they 
have a near relationship to squirrels, which belong to the Rodents, an 
inferior order of mammals ; their resemblance to those animals is merely 
a superficial one. ‘They have two molar teeth less in each jaw than the 
