222 ACROSS NHAMBIQUARA LAND [chap, vii 



least fear of man or dog. The sariema (like the screamer 

 and the curassow) ought to be introduced into our 

 barnyards and on our fawns, 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 Columbia, MiUer 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 bubbles or hoUows 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 rolUng country east of this 

 contained eruptive rocks — a porphyritic diabase, with 

 zeolite, quartz, and agate of triassic age. With the 

 chapadao of the Parcels plateau we came to a land of 

 sand and clay, dotted with lumps of sandstone and 

 pieces of petrified wood ; this, according to Oliveii'a, is 

 of mesozoic age, possibly cretaceous, and similar to the 

 South African formation. There are geologists who 

 consider it as of permian age. 



At VUhena we were on a watershed which drained 

 into the Gy-Parana, which itself runs into the Madeira 

 nearly midway between its sources and its mouth. A 

 little farther along and northward we again came to 



