VOYAGE TO SANTAREM 69 
or roseate wing-like pieces (follicles), each with a 
small black globose seed at the apex ; and Davila 
Radula, Mart., allied to the Curatella, and like it 
with rough leaves, but bearing very large panicles 
of flowers, whose yellow, two-valved, indurated, and 
persistent calyces looked not unlike half-split peas. 
Over bushes and lianas trailed the thread-like 
entangled stems of Cassytha brasiliensis , a leafless 
herb like our Dodders, but in the structure of the 
minute white flowers so closely allied to the Laurels 
that it must perforce be classed along with them, 
notwithstanding the contrast in external appearance 
between one of the humblest herbs and some of 
the noblest trees in the world. 
Some parts of the campo had been fired early in 
the dry season, and the burnt ground had become 
partially clad with beds of two curious hoary plants, 
from I to 3 feet high, the one a Leguminifer 
{Collcea Jussiceana, Bth.), with leaves of three leaflets 
clad with white down, and small purple flowers ; 
the other a Menisperm (Cissampelos assimilis, Miers) 
with roundish excentrically ►peltate woolly leaves, 
and blackish corrugated capsules resembling a dead 
caterpillar curled head to tail. 
The annual burnings are in some places followed 
by a dense growth of a fern, Pteris caudata, which 
no subsequent burnings, or anything but fairly 
stubbing it up, can thenceforth eradicate. This 
fern is scarcely to be distinguished as a species 
from the common bracken [Pteris aquilind) of our 
heaths, although the longer, slenderer, and drooping 
points of the divisions of its front give it a rather 
different aspect. 
Near the aldea, where the soil was rather less 
