428 
AEOHATIC SHEUBS. 
pared zones equally distant, either from the perpetual snow, 
or from the isothermal line of 0°.* 
In the little thicket of the Pejual, near the purple-flowered 
befaria, grows a heath-leaved hedyotis, eight feet high ; the 
caparosa,f which is a large arborescent liypericum ; a lepi- 
dium, which appears identical with that of Virginia; and 
lastly, lycopodiaceous plants and mosses, which cover the 
rocks and roots of the trees. That which gives most cele- 
brity in the country to the little thicket, is a shrub ten or 
fifteen feet high, of the corymb ifero us family. The Creoles call 
it incense (ineienso).f Its tough and crenate leaves, as well 
as the extremities of the branches, are covered with a white 
wool. It is a new species of Trixis, extremely resinous, the 
flowers of which have the agreeable odour of storax. This 
smell is very different from that emitted by the leaves of the 
Trixis terebinthinacea of the mountains of Jamaica, opposite 
to those of Caracas. The people sometimes mix the incienso 
of the Silla with the flowers of the pevetera, another compo- 
site plant, the smell of which resembles that of the helio- 
fcropium of Peru. The pevetera does not, however, grow on 
the mountains so high as the zone of the befarias; it 
vegetates in the valley of Chacao, and the ladies of Caracas 
prepare from it an extremely pleasant odoriferous water. 
We spent a long time iu examining the fine resinous and 
fragrant plants of the Pejual. The sky became more and 
more cloudy, and the thermometer sank below 11°, a tempe- 
rature at which, in this zone, people begin to suffer from the 
cold. Quitting the little thicket of alpine plants, we found 
ourselves again in a savannah. We climbed over a part of 
the western dome, in order to descend into the hollow of 
the Silla, a valley which separates the two summits of the 
* The stratum of air, the mean temperature of which is 0°, and which 
scarcely coincides with the superior limit of perpetual snow, is found in 
the parallel of the rhododendrons of Switzerland at nine hundred toises ; 
in the parallel of the befarias of Caracas, at two thousand seven hundred 
toises of elevation. 
f Vismia caparosa (a loranthus clings to this plant, and appropriates 
to itself the yellow juice of the vismia); Davallia meifolia, Heracium 
avilce, Aralia arborea, Jacq., and Lepidium virginieum. Two new species 
of lycopodium, the thyoldes, and the aristatum, are seen lower down, 
aear the Puerta de la Silla. 
+ Trixis nereifolia of M. Bonpland. 
