344 NOTES OF A BOTANIST 
I foot thick, branched almost from base. It bears flowers and 
fruits all the year round. The flowers are the size of those of Cam- 
panula latifolia^ smelling like primroses, borne few together near 
apex of the shoots, very fugacious, falling off in a few hours after 
expansion. The tree is said to be abundant on Rio Apuri, but 
always near houses. 
The obtusely trigonous drupes, about the size of garden cherries, 
are greenish or yellowish when ripe. I observed that the Com- 
mandant's fowls picked up the fruits as they fell and greedily 
devoured the fleshy covering ; so, thinking that what was food for 
them could not be poison for me, I ate three or four of them, and 
found them to have little taste — very slightly sweet — ^nor did I 
experience any ill effects. Yet the milky juice of the tree is a 
deadly poison. 
The bony endocarps, of the same shape as the drupes, are 
perforated and strung a great many together on long strings by 
the Indians, who wear them wound round their ankles so as to 
keep up a continual rattling in their dances. 
At Marabitanas, as elsewhere, I saw fowls watch all day under 
the male trees of the Papaya and pick up the flowers which fell, 
almost in a shower, especially in the after part of the day. 
[While at Marabitanas Spruce made the sketches 
here given of two Indian girls of the Macii tribe, 
of which he gives the following account : — 
The Macus are one of the few wandering 
tribes, with no fixed residence, who exist in the 
forests of the Amazon and are met with through 
nearly the whole length of the Rio Negro, but 
principally to westward of it. Two Macu girls 
taken in a marauding expedition at the head of the 
Icanna had been recently purchased by the Com- 
mandant of Marabitanas when I visited him in 
July 1853. The few men I had seen of that nation 
were mostly such miserable specimens of humanity 
that I was greatly surprised to find in the elder girl 
one of the finest faces I had seen ; and, notwith- 
standing her brown skin, I think it very probable 
she may have had white blood in her veins. The 
poor creatures were downcast, as might be expected 
