VII 
AT MANAoS 
255 
[The following letter to his friend Mr. Matthew 
B. Slater, who was a student of British plants, 
gives a very vivid account of the more prominent 
botanical features of the great Amazonian forests, 
which will be more generally interesting than the 
details referred to in the letters to his botanical 
correspondents at Kew.] 
To Mr. Matthew B. Slater 
Barra do Rio Negro, October 1851. 
Do you now and then deign to pick up a moss 
or a lichen ? I do not say that I have been obliged 
altogether to renounce Cryptogams, but in effect 
it comes very near it. Not only are mosses exceed- 
ingly scarce and limited in species, but I find myself 
in the midst of such very novel forms of higher orders 
of plants that it would be unpardonable to neglect 
them. Still, my Muscological studies have been of 
great use to me in giving me habits of accurate and 
patient analysis, and after dissecting the peristomes, 
etc., of mosses, I find most dissections of the parts 
of Phanerogamia comparatively easy. My micro- 
scope is rarely taken out now except to examine 
ovaries and embryos. I wish I could have you 
here for a week — in that time you would learn more 
of natural orders than in England in a year. I 
speak not alone of the few orders that include your 
European Flora, but of all those peculiar to the 
tropics, of which your herbariums and botanic 
gardens must ever give an imperfect idea. Unless 
Mr. Paxton's Crystal Palace could be kept at an 
average heat of 80°, the noble Laurels, Silk-cotton 
