ACROSS NHAMBIQUARA LAND 231 



hoppers and beetles and young leaves. At Vilhena there 

 was a tame sariema, much more familiar and at home than 

 any of the poultry. It was without the least fear of man 

 or dog. The sariema (like the screamer and the curassow) 

 ought to be introduced into our barnyards and on our 

 lawns, at any rate in the Southern States; it is a good- 

 looking, friendly, and attractive bird. Another bird we 

 met is in some places far more intimate, and domesticates 

 itself. This is the pretty little honey-creeper. In Colombia 

 Miller found the honey-creepers habitually coming inside 

 the houses and hotels at meal-times, hopping about the 

 table, and climbing into the sugar-bowl. 



Along this part of our march there was much of what 

 at a hasty glance seemed to be volcanic rock; but Oliveira 

 showed me that it was a kind of conglomerate, with bub- 

 bles or hollows in it, made of sand and iron-bearing earth. 

 He said it was a superficial quaternary deposit, formed by 

 erosion from the cretaceous rocks, and that there were 

 here no tertiary deposits. He described the geological 

 structure of the lands through which we had passed as 

 follows: The pantanals were of pleistocene age. Along 

 the upper Sepotuba, in the region of the rapids, there were 

 sandstones, shales, and clays of permian age. The rolling 

 country east of this contained eruptive rocks — a porphy- 

 ritic diabase, with zeolite, quartz, and agate of triassic 

 age. With the chapadao of the Parecis plateau we came 

 to a land of sand and clay, dotted with lumps of sand- 

 stone and pieces of petrified wood; this, according to Oli- 

 veira, is of mesozoic age, possibly cretaceous and similar 

 to the South African formation. There are geologists who 

 consider it as of permian age. 



