DOWN THE AMAZONS. 251 



feet high, which, instead of green, had apparently 

 red or rose-coloured leaves. It was a new species of 

 Bougainvillaea, a genus first established by the elder 

 Jussieu, from a Brazilian specimen in Commerson's 

 herbarium. The trees were almost entirely without true 

 leaves, as what were taken for leaves at a distance, proved 

 to be thickly crowded bracteas. The appearance was 

 altogether different, in the purity and freshness of the 

 colour, from the autumnal tints which, in many of our 

 forest trees, adorn the woods of the temperate zone at the 

 season of the fall of the leaf. 



They found at Chamaya rafts in readiness to convey 

 them to Tomependa, which they desired to visit for the 

 purpose of determining the difference of longitude be- 

 tween Quito and the mouth of the Chinchipe. They 

 slept as usual under the open sky, on the sandy shore at 

 the confluence of the Rio de Chamaya with the Amazons. 

 The next day they embarked on the latter river, and 

 descended it to the Cataracts and Narrows of Rentema, 

 where rocks of coarse-grained sandstone rose like towers, 

 and formed a rocky dam across the river. Humboldt 

 measured a base line on the flat and sandy shore, and 

 found that at Tomependa the afterwards mighty river of 

 the Amazons was only a little above thirteen hundred 

 and eighty-six feet across. In the celebrated River 

 Narrow of Manseritche, between Santiago and San 

 Borja, in a mountain ravine where at some points the 

 overhanging rocks and the canopy of foliage forbade 

 more than a feeble light to penetrate, and where all the 

 drift wood, consisting of a countless number of trunks of 

 trees, was broken and dashed in pieces, the breadth of the 

 stream was less than one hundred and sixty feet. The 



