THE STRAIT OF MAGELLAN. 35 



varying in colour from white or pale lilac to primrose and 

 deep yellow or orange, with a marone heart {Thionbergia), and 

 a highly sensitive Mimosa with little rounded heads of purple 

 flowers, and short semi-prostrate stems covered with minutely- 

 pinnated leaves. The irritable nature of the last plant revealed 

 itself to one on stooping to pluck a specimen, by the pinna? 

 of its leaflets immediately folding up on the midribs, and the 

 leaves as a whole becoming rapidly deflexed on the stem. 

 I afterwards found that by stamping smartly on the ground 

 the same effect could be produced, the whole plant collapsing 

 in the most curious way. In some places the ground was 

 covered with this species to the exclusion of any other, and 

 by drawing a stick over a space covered by it, what at first 

 appeared as a green and flourishing patch of vegetation 

 assumed the semblance of a blighted and dying one. 



A large and handsome blue butterfly, the first specimen of 

 a species with which we became very familiar in the course 

 of a subsequent visit to Eio, was observed flying along the 

 road, and pursued and captured by two of the party, who after- 

 wards became zealous butterfly-hunters, but was obtained in 

 a too injured condition to be worth preserving. We reached 

 the gardens early in the afternoon, and spent some hours 

 wandering about in them. Though not in that state of good 

 order which one is accustomed to see in European gardens of 

 the same class, they are well worth visiting, possessing much 

 interest for the naturalist, from the wealth of tropical vegeta- 

 tion contained in them. They have been for long justly cele- 

 brated for their fine avenue of cabbage-palms (Oreodoxa 

 oleracea), which certainly furnishes a remarkable object, 

 although hardly in my opinion a very attractive one, from the 

 stiff nature of the growth of its constituent members, the 

 stems of which appeared to me like tall and slender stone 



