198 SANTAREM. Cuap. VIII. 
this country ; the milk, I was told, is too poor; it is very rare indeed 
to see even the thinnest coating of cream on it, and the yield for 
each cow is very small. Our dairyman had to bring from Santarem 
every morning the meat, bread, and vegetables for the day’s consumption. 
The other residents of Mahicd were not even so well off as this man. 
I always had to bring my own provisions when I came this way, for 
a perennial famine seemed to reign in the place. I could not help 
picturing to myself the very different aspect this fertile tract of country 
would wear if it were peopled by a few families of agricultural settlers 
from Northern Europe. 
Although the meadows were unproductive ground to a Naturalist, the 
woods on their borders teemed with life ; the number and variety of 
curious insects of all orders which occurred here was quite wonderful. 
The belt of forest was intersected by numerous pathways leading from 
one settler’s house to another. The ground was moist, but the trees 
were not so lofty or their crowns so densely packed together as in other 
parts ; the sun’s light and heat therefore had freer access to the soil, and 
the underwood was much more diversified than in the virgin forest. I 
never saw so many kinds of dwarf palms together as here: pretty 
miniature species ; some not more than five feet high, and bearing little 
clusters of round fruit not larger than a good bunch of currants. A few 
of the forest trees had the size and strongly-branched figures of our 
oaks, and asimilar bark. One noble palm grew here in great abundance, 
and gave a distinctive character to the district. This was the Ginocarpus 
distichus, one of the kinds called Bacaba by the natives. It grows to 
a height of forty to fifty feet. ‘The crown is of a lustrous dark-green 
colour, and of a singularly flattened or compressed shape ; the leaves 
being arranged on each side in nearly the same plane. When I first 
saw this tree on the campos, where the east wind blows with great force 
night and day for several months, I thought the shape of the crown was 
due to the leaves being prevented from radiating equally by the constant 
action of the breezes. But the plane of growth is not always in the 
direction of the wind, and the crown has the same shape when the tree 
grows in the sheltered woods. ‘The fruit of this fine palm ripens towards 
the end of the year, and is much esteemed by the natives, who manu- 
facture a pleasant drink from it similar to the assai described in a former 
chapter, by rubbing off the coat of pulp from the nuts, and mixing 
it with water. A bunch of fruit weighs thirty or forty pounds. The 
beverage has a milky appearance, and an agreeable nutty flavour. The 
tree is very difficult to climb, on account of the smoothness of its stem ; 
consequently the natives, whenever they want a bunch of fruit for a 
bowl of Bacdba, cut down and thus destroy a tree which has taken a 
score or two of years to grow, in order to get at it. 
In the lower part of the Mahicd woods, towards the river, there is a 
bed of stiff white clay, which supplies the people of Santarem with 
material for the manufacture of coarse pottery and cooking utensils ; all 
the kettles, saucepans, mandioca ovens, coffee-pots, washing-vessels, and 
so forth, of the poorer classes throughout the country, are made of this 
same plastic clay, which occurs at short intervals over the whole surface 
of the Amazons valley, from the neighbourhood of Para to within the 
