224 NOTES OF A BOTANIST 
will have learnt from a letter I wrote to Mr. 
Saunders that I found the vegetation there (in 
October 1858) consisted of so very few species 
that I judged it expedient to return to the Sierra, 
where I found the people in great alarm — more 
at the devastating progress of their own armies 
than at the threatened invasion of the Peruvians — 
and ready to desert the towns should hostilities 
actually commence. So the risk of losing all my 
goods has kept me from leaving them far, during 
the remainder of the dry season. But for this, I 
should, after leaving Pallatanga, have plunged into 
some other forest, for I find that the woody slopes 
on both sides of the Andes must be in future my 
principal field for collecting, the really Alpine 
plants having been already gathered to a great 
extent, and having most of them a very wide 
range. 
I am now packing my flowers and ferns, which 
(especially the former) comprise many interesting 
things, gathered under disadvantageous circum- 
stances. The difficulties of travelling anywhere 
out of the central plain of the Ecuadorean Andes 
is immense. Roads there are none — what go by 
that name are deep slippery gullies and narrow 
ledges along steep declivities, where far more lives 
are annually lost than in navigating the rivers of 
the plain. . . . 
To Mr. George Bentham 
Ambato, Apidl 13, 1859. 
. . . The collection now sent is not of the class 
I could have liked, but the unsettled state of the 
