70 MEMOIR OF 



ingenuity. Azara is not to be regarded as an adept 

 in Ichthyology or Entomology, which sciences, when 

 he left Europe, were in a very different state from 

 what they now are. Probably he had never re- 

 ceived a single lesson regarding them, nor had in 

 his possession the most elementary treatise relating 

 to them. Nothing daunted, however, and quite 

 aware of his deficiencies, he determined to allow 

 nothing to escape his scrutiny ; and his memoirs on 

 these subjects, more especially the one on the insects 

 of the provinces, extending to seventy pages, and 

 including observations on bees and their products, 

 and wasps and their habits, on the immense colo- 

 nies of ants, on the different kinds of flies, the pests 

 of these countries, on beetles and locusts, and their 

 overwhelming migrations, &c. &c,, cannot easily 

 be surpassed either in interest or usefulness. Pre- 

 cisely similar remarks apply to his observations on 

 the Vegetable world. He was a horticulturist and 

 florist rather than a botanist, and very entertain- 

 ingly discourses of whatever was most useful in 

 these departments ; of trees, shrubs, and grains, in 

 their wildest luxuriance ; of the Paraguay tree, so 

 often already mentioned in these pages, which is in 

 these regions what tea is in China, the object of 

 assiduous cultivation and extensive trade ; of many 

 medicinal plants ; of those which yield caoutchouc ; 

 of cotton, sugar-cane, vines, and tobacco ; of coffee 

 and cacao, indigo, and silk ; of maize and mandioc, 

 or cassava, whence tapioca is prepared ; of oils and 

 fruits and culinary vegetables. On these it was our 



