74: ON THE GEOGRAPHY OF ANIMALS. 
different features in different localities, and which the 
Brazilians distinguish by appropriate names. The 
Campos are vast plains similar to those on the banks of 
the great Rio St. Francisco, covered with coarse grass, 
and destitute of trees. They are scorched during sum- 
mer, and present little other vegetation during the rainy 
season. The Campos appear, in fact, to be a continu- 
ation of the Pampas of Paraguay and the Rio de la 
Plata, and are analogous to the interior deserts of 
Africa: water, excepting in the great rivers, is equally 
scarce; and in dry seasons, hundreds of cattle pe- 
rish, and whole villages migrate. These dreary plains 
are frequently elevated ; but in such situations, the 
coarse and scanty herbage is generally intermixed with 
stunted trees, growing at short intervals, as in a park: 
clear of underwood, and open to the route of the tra- 
veller in every direction, such tracts are termed Tabu- 
laras, or table-lands, since they are almost always 
raised a few hundred feet above the level of the sea. 
Lands of this description are frequently broken by 
narrow valleys, or gentle hollows, wherein the trees 
become higher, and acquire a more flourishing growth, 
thus forming woods; yet they are so matted together 
by a thick underwood of Cacti, Bromelia, and other 
spinous plants, intermixed with thickets of coarse-leaved 
flowering shrubs, as to be almost impassable to any but 
the hunter: these are the Catinga woods of the 
Brazilians; and it is here that the numerous and 
splendid family of Epidendrum, and other parasitic 
plants, few of which are yet known to botanists, 
root round the bark, or spring from the stems, of 
the larger trees. The general character of the soil, in 
all the localities here described, is more or less sandy ; | 
and although never destitute of vegetation, the plants 
have almost always a parched, stunted, and withered ap- 
pearance, except, as be‘ore observed, during the rainy 
,season. These observations, apparently foreign to our 
present subject, are nevertheless so closely connected 
with it, that, without them, it would be impossible to 
