146 NOTES OF A BOTANIST 
the campo. Some idea of their variety may be 
obtained from the fact of my having gathered 
ninety species at Santarem. Sedges were less 
numerous, both in species and individuals, but 
included some pretty things, especially the species 
of Dichromena, which have the heads of flowers 
subtended by parti -coloured tracts, green below, 
white above. For the first three months in the 
year little was to be seen in flower but these 
grasses and sedges, and a few weedy plants in the 
neighbourhood of habitations. The trees — instead 
of being revivified by the rains, as in some other 
parts of tropical Brazil, where they lose their leaves 
during the dry season, or, in other words, cestivate — 
looked every day more and more dingy ; and it was 
not until well on in the wet season, or even at the 
beginning of the dry, that most of them pushed 
forth new leaves and threw off the old ones. A 
very few shrubs, however, on the arid campo, that 
had seemed withered up at the end of the dry 
season, were clad with new verdure under the 
influence of the rains. One of these, Connarus 
crassifolius, sp. n., with leaves of three leaflets, like 
the Laburnum, but much thicker and stouter, and 
bearing a profusion of snowy flowers, was very 
handsome ; it belongs to a small order (Conna- 
raceae) which trenches closely on some of the 
outlying members of Rosaceae and Leguminosae. 
As the ground became saturated with moisture, 
bare sandy and gravelly places on the campo got 
spotted over with patches of vegetation, some 
white, others green — the former composed of Poly- 
carpcea brasiliensis , a pretty weed, rather like the 
Spurrey of our cornfields ; the latter of a grass 
