CiiAi'. Yll. FORESTS OF THE RIO NEGRO. 341 



He had passed us by night below Serpa, on his way to 

 Barra, and so had arrived about three weeks before 

 me. Besides ourselves, there were half-a-dozen other 

 foreigners here congregated, — Englishmen, Germans, 

 and Americans ; one of them a Natural History col- 

 lector, the rest traders on the rivers. In the pleasant 

 society of these, and of the family of Senhor Henriques, 

 we passed a delightful time ; the miseries of our long 

 river voyages were soon forgotten, and in two or three 

 weeks we began to talk of further explorations. Mean- 

 time we had almost daily rambles in the neighbouring 

 forest. The country around Barra is undulating and 

 furrowed by ravines, through which flow rivulets of 

 clear cold water, along Avhose banks many picturesque 

 nooks occur. The whole surface of the land down to 

 the water's edge is covered by the uniform dark-gi-een 

 rolling forest, the cad-apoa/ni (convex woods) of the 

 Indians, characteristic of the Rio Negro. This clothes 

 also the extensive areas of low land, which are flooded 

 by the river in the rainy season. The olive-brown tinge 

 of the water seems to be derived from the saturation in 

 it of the dark o-reen foliao-e durinof these annual inunda- 

 tions. The great contrast in form and colour between the 

 forests of the Rio Negro and those of the Amazons arises 

 fi'om the predominance in each of different families of 

 plants. On the main river, palms of twenty or thirty 

 different species form a great proportion of the mass of 

 trees ; whilst on the Rio Negro they play a very sub- 

 ordinate part. The characteristic kind in the latter 

 region is the Jara (Leopoldinia pulchra), a species not 

 found on the margins of the Amazons, which has a scanty 



