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The price of a good bow in Santarem is five or six patacas. I send 

 an arrow, such as is used at Santarem for killing fish, such as Pira- 

 rucu, Tucunare, &c. ; the one-barbed head is called in lingoa geral, 

 * ta^u-umba.' " 



" After making several attempts to procure the flowers and fruit of 

 the Itaiiba T have at length succeeded. The nearest place in which 

 1 could obtain information of its growing was in the forest beyond 

 Matrica, an Indian village about four miles down the Amazon ; and 

 in a visit I paid to them by water in March last, I found the flower- 

 buds of the Itaiiba just appearing. My illness prevented me from 

 visiting the same place again until a long time afterwards, and in an 

 attempt which Mr. King made to reach it alone, over land, he did not 

 succeed, on account of the water in the low grounds. In another ex- 

 cursion, the trees we met with were all sterile. At length, in the 

 early part of the present month, we were fortunate in falling in with a 

 tree laden with fruit. The only way to obtain the fruit was to cut 

 down the tree ; but our tresados, which generally sufiice for this pur- 

 pose, made no impression on the hard wood of the Itaiiba. In this 

 emergency, Mr. King made his way to an Indian cottage which we 

 had passed a few minutes before, and soon returned with a heavy 

 American felling-axe. With this he succeeded in severing the trunk, 

 but not until he had well blistered his hands. The drupes resemble 

 in size and colour our small black grapes, only they are more elon- 

 gated, and they hang in small panicles. The Brazilians compare 

 them, and justly, to the small variety of olive which is imported in 

 great quantities from Portugal. They have a slight bloom on them, 

 and the pellicle is studded with pallid, glandular dots. The pulp is 

 about the eighth of an inch in thickness ; it is good eating, though 

 with a strong resinous flavour, much resembling that of an edible 

 myrtle frequent on the campos, and a wine is made from it in the same 

 way as that of the Assai palm. The testa is horny and very thin ; 

 albumen none; cotyledons amygdaloid, rose-coloured on the inner 

 face; embryo pendulous from a little below the apex of the seed. 

 The 6-cleft calyx is persistent, but not enlarged in fruit as in most of 

 the Lauraceae I have seen on the Amazon. I had long suspected the 

 dioicity of the Itaiiba; I have now confirmed it; and I find that I 

 gathered male flowers on the 30th of April, though at the time I did 

 not recognize the tree, which was small and young, and grew in a 

 part of the forest quite near to Santarem, which had been cut down 

 some dozen years ago. On revisiting the place within these few days, 

 I found two or three female trees, of the same size, growing near, and 



