VOYAGE TO SANTAREM 71 
round, some of them bearing spikes of feathery 
flowers ; others (species of Panicum) had long 
distantly-jointed stems, simulating slender bam- 
boos, and supporting themselves on the branches 
of the trees that margined the campo, climbed to a 
height of 15 or more feet. Wherever the soil 
was turfy, there were cushion-like patches of the 
Mahica, a small monocotyledonous herb, whose 
densely-set, deep green, bristle-like leaves give it 
quite the aspect of P oly trie hum juniperinum, one of 
the common mosses of our moors, from which it is 
widely separated by the pretty flowers of three 
petals, red in one species [Mayaca Sellowinna, 
Kunth) and white in another (J/. Michauxii, Endl.). 
It gives its name to the campo and igarape, and is 
a singular instance of even an insignificant herb 
having the same name (with the difference of a 
letter) in the Amazon valley and in French Guay- 
ana, where it was first found and made known to 
science by Aublet. 
Along with the Mayacae, and elsewhere on the 
campo where there was little grass, trailed a 
delicate Rubiad i^Sipmiea ocymoides), so like, in its 
opposite lanceolate leaves and pink flowers, to the 
European Saponaria ocymoides, which I had seen a 
few years before ornamenting crumbling schists in 
the Pyrenees, that at first sight I could hardly 
believe it was not the same. Besides these, the 
few plants in flower on the campo were two or 
three Jussi^ae, Coutoubea spicata, Aubl. (of the 
order Gentianeae) ; Peschiera latiflora, Benth., an 
Apocyneous shrub only a foot high, but with large 
jessamine- like flowers; and a few annual Mela- 
stomes. 
