384 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1926 
young Brazil for a time swarmed with naturalists. Publication of 
their results began to appear as early as 1823 when Raddi’s Agrosto- 
graphia Brasiliensis, a little volume of 58 pages, the earliest work on 
South American grasses, was published. 
Except Pohl, who went as far as Goyaz, most of the naturalists 
remained in the vicinity of Rio de Janeiro or traveled short distances 
southward, but Martius and Spix, after a few months about Rio de 
Janeiro, went to Sao Paulo and from there made their way north- 
ward through Minas Geraes and Bahia to the city of Bahia. From 
there they went by boat to Ilheos and returned by land, then trav- 
ersed Bahia, Piauhy, and Maranhao to the north coast, crossing Rio 
Sao Francisco at Joazeiro. They then traveled up the Amazon to 
some distance beyond Teffe (or Ega). 
The Amazon and other parts of Brazil have since been explored 
by Germans, Swedes, Swiss, English, Brazilians, and in recent years 
by Americans, and the United States National Herbarium has, by 
exchange, come in for a share of the plants collected, but there was 
no United States National Herbarium at the time of Martius and but 
little since has been collected, at least of grasses, in the region he 
traversed in the interior; wherefore the grasses of that region were 
known to us only (or chiefly) from the specimens preserved in the 
herbaria at Brussels, Munich, and Vienna. 
I reached Rio de Janeiro late November 1, 1924. The entrance to 
the bay has been described many times, and we are all familiar with 
pictures of it, but the reality is almost overwhelming. As we neared 
Sugar Loaf with peaks in all directions I had the sensation of sailing 
into the tops of a mountain chain on a flood. 
The following afternoon I spent on Corcovado. As I clambered 
along a narrow trail on a steep slope I seemed to be following Raddi’s 
footsteps, for I collected several of his species of grasses described 
from this mountain. 
In spite of the dense population in the lowlands the mountains 
about Rio de Janeiro have not been spoiled for the botanist. Except 
for the invasion in places of Melinis minutiflora, called capim 
gordura (molasses grass by us), an African species early introduced 
into Brazil, the steep jungly slopes, I imagine, are not greatly 
changed from what they were a hundred years ago. As elsewhere in 
the Serra do Mar (the coast range) there are great bare slopes and 
knobs of dark granite or gneiss. st! 
Rio de Janeiro is very healthful now. In the last three years a 
great hill in the city has been cut down, letting the sea air across to 
the back, and a tidal marsh is being filled with the material removed. 
The city is built in and out of the hollows between the hills, only a 
relatively few houses, mostly hotels for foreigners, being in the hills. 
