68 MY LIFE 



was with Dufour at St. Sever, in April. [846, he received 

 a large parcel of plants recently gathered in the Sierra 

 Guadarama by Prof. Graells, of Madrid. A wry large pro- 

 !>• >rtion were aromatic, and many of them Labiates. 



" 1 cannot make out that plants with scented leaves abound 

 more in the tropics than in mid-Europe; nor does there 

 seem to be a larger proportion of them in any zone of the 

 equatorial Andes than in the Amazonian plain ; although, as 

 hill-plants are often gregarious, and those of hot plains very 

 rarely so, odoriferous plants may seem more prevalent in the 

 high Andes than on the Amazon. 



' Plants growing nearest eternal snow in the Andes are, 

 however (so far as I have observed them), all scentless; but 

 some acquire an aroma in drying, as, for example the thick 

 roots of the \ r alerians that abound there. 



" Aromatic plants grow in the Andes up to, perhaps, 13,000 

 feet, and consist chiefly of Composites, Myrtles, Labiates and 

 Verbenas. I know a hill-side at about 9000 feet, which at 

 this time of year is one mass of odoriferous foliage and 

 flowers, chiefly of a Labiate undershrub (Gardoquia fasci- 

 culata, Bth.). Another slope of far wider extent is much 

 gayer with varied colour mainly of the blue flowers of Dalea 

 Mutisii H. B. K. — a papilionaceous shrub allied to the Indigos 

 — and of the red-purple foxglove-like flowers of Lamourou.ria 

 virgata H. B. K. (which is parasitic on the roots of the 

 Dalea) mingled with the yellow flowers of the Quitenian 

 broom {Genista Quitensis, L.), and of many other herbs 

 and shrubs with flowers of various shades of colour ; but 

 aromatic plants are almost unrepresented except by scattered 

 bushes of a Salvia and a Eupatorium. Analogous contrasts 

 are common enough in our own country. 



1 In those parts of the Peruvian and Quitenian Andes 

 I have explored, I have not found odoriferous plants more 

 abundant than in some parts of England and the Pyrenees; 

 yet they are quite as much so as in the Amazonian plain, and 

 often belong to the same Natural Orders. Now leaf-cut- 

 ting ants are unknown in the Andes ; whence I infer that, 

 although the presence of a pungent smell and taste may be 



