XI 
SAN CARLOS 
383 
since I set foot in South America, now more than four years ago, 
I have not once seen Funaria hygrometrica — the moss which, as 
some one has said, more poetically than truly, "springs up 
wherever the wild Indian has lighted his fire." I have seen 
hundreds of places in Amazonian forests where Indians, wild and 
tame, have lighted fires, and the plants which spring up in such 
places are not mosses. I shall some day be able to tell you what 
they mostly are. There is a moss which seems partial to charred 
' trunks ; it resembles Hyp?ium tamariscinum in miniature, and I 
take it to be H. involvejis. Ceratodon p2irpurei{s is an almost 
constant companion of Funaria hygrometrica in Europe, and has, 
like it, the reputation of being cosmopolite, but I have never seen 
it here. 
The Hepaticae have been everywhere much more numerous 
than the Mosses, and will, I hope, comprise much that is new. 
The great mass belong to the genus Lejeunia, but there are 
several species of Omphalanthus, Phragmicoma, Mastigobryum, 
Plagiochila, Aneura, etc. One of the commonest Hepaticse on 
the Rio Negro is a Sphagnoecetis, quite like our Jimgermannia 
Sphagni in aspect, but smaller, and fruiting abundantly towards 
the end of the rainy season. I have a good many new species 
allied to common European forms, as, for instance, to J. 
biaispidata and trichophylla ; and a series of several species, 
apparently all undescribed, intermediate between foliose and 
frondose Hepaticse. 
Very few Mosses grow on the inundated margins of the large 
rivers, and they are species that recur everywhere. It is neces- 
sary to plunge into the heart of the forest and to seek out rocky 
rivulets and the trunks of fallen trees which lie in or near them. 
Hence when I ascended the Rio Negro in November 185 1, when 
the river was low, although there were abundance of trees in 
flower, the Mosses on the banks were so much dried up as 
to appear almost non-existent. The contrary was the case when 
I came from the Rio Uaupes to San Carlos in March last, when 
the rivers were rising and the rains were frequent and violent. 
The trunks of the inundated trees were in many cases clad with a 
green coating of Mosses and Hepaticse, but the trees themselves 
were almost without exception destitute of flowers, 
I shall do my best to explore the mountains at the back 
of Esmeralda, but I do not expect much from them. The great 
peculiarity of the mountains I have hitherto visited is that they 
are hills without valleys — lumps of granite sticking up out of the 
plain. They seem all destitute of water, and this is probably the 
reason why they are quite uninhabited, there not being, so far as I 
can learn, so much as an Indian's hut on all the mountains of the 
Rio Negro and Alto Orinoco. 
I am glad to find that my specimens, both for the herbarium 
