398 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1926 
Trachypogon, Mesosetum, and Thrasya, genera characteristic of the 
campos, and many species of Awonopus, Paspalum, and Panicum were 
a joy to an agrostologist. Species long known in the herbarium 
are often surprising when met in the field. One especially so was 
a species of Paspalum I found climbing trees. This had a simple 
cane 2 or 3 meters tall, erect among low trees by a rocky stréam- 
let. When it reached the branches of a tree it sent out numer- 
ous horizontal or recurved branches and clambered on up the tree, 
branching in all directions, with broad racemes of white spikelets 
against a dark purple ribbon-like rachis at the ends of the 
branches. My annotated manuscript list of Brazilian grasses showed 
it must be Paspalum phyllorhachis Hack., but who ever dreamed 
of such a habit for a grass known from specimens we now see were 
but ends of ultimate branches. I found it again higher up the Serra, 
with nothing to climb on and forming a tangled thicket on a little 
shelf of rock. This species was known from a single collection by 
Glaziou, the locality given as “ Minas Geraes,” only. I found it 
only in Serra do Curral, and that is probably the type locality. 
Collecting was so good I went back several times before I reached 
the submit of the Pico, 1,400 meters, on the stony slope of which 
waved the little silky white banners of Paspalum blepharophorum. 
At Bello Horizonte I was the guest of Miss Christine, principal 
of the Collegio Isabelle Hendrix. The grasses of the region alone 
would have made this place a delight, but the companionship of in- 
teresting women, the little children who helped me spread my driers 
in the sun, even the kindly cook who tolerated my plant presses be- 
hind her stove, made it about the best-loved spot in all Brazil. 
One of the most interesting finds of the entire Brazilian trip 
was made in low ground west of Bello Horizonte. This was a new 
species of Lithachne, a monoecious genus of which but two species 
were known, one in tropical North America and southward to 
northern Brazil, the other known only from eastern Cuba. ‘This 
was strikingly different from either. The culms bearing the pistillate 
spikelets are very slender, vinelike, running along the moist ground 
a meter or more under other vegetation. It was a delicate task to 
untangle them without loss of their few hood-shaped white spike- 
lets. 
A few hours north of Bello Horizonte is Lagoa Santa made classic 
by Pedro Lund, the Danish botanist and anthropologist, and by Claus- 
sen, Warming, and others who visited him. Lund was a consumptive 
who went to Brazil for his health. After a few years he returned 
to Denmark cured, but the disease again attacked him and he returned 
to Lagoa Santa to die. Being a Protestant he could not be buried 
in the cemetery, so he bought a piece of ground about 5 kilometers 
