HISTORICAL ACCOUNT OF THE HERBARIUM. 
6l 
period (1849-51). The original letter was presented by Miss Baines 
in June, 1894, to the Yorkshire Philosophical Society. 
“ Sao Gabriel da Cachoeira, 
“ Rio Negro, 
“ 17th Feb., 1851. 
“ My Dear Sir, 
“ Nearly three years have elapsed since you and I last met, years (to me) of 
wanderings, where toil and pleasure have been pretty equally intermingled. In 
that time I have often had it in my mind to write to you, but somehow had 
never courage to set about it. I regretted much that I did not see you at Kew, 
to bid you adieu. I went to the gardens at 1 o'clock as we had arranged, and 
sought for you in the museum and palm house. Finally I traced you to Mr. 
Smith’s, and there learnt (to my regret) that had I gone thither at first I should 
have found you, but that you had taken your departure a quarter of an hour 
previously. 
“ I have thought since that you were probably offended at my apparent 
neglect, especially as you did not send me the York papers as you had promised, 
and as I cannot afford to lose a friend so old and valued as yourself (friends in 
this world of ours being never too abundant), I wish you to believe (what is the 
truth) that our not meeting on the occasion alluded to was not owing either to 
any loss of love, or to want of punctuality on my part. I am not, however, 
going to fill a letter up with apologies. You will want to know something of 
what I have seen and done on the Amazons. My previous expectations, in so 
far as they had taken a definite shape, have been disappointed, both agreeably 
and disagreeably. After wasting much time in searching for Orchises, I have 
been compelled to conclude that they are exceedingly scarce, and (in the eyes 
of cultivators) worthless on the Amazon. It is only on the Rio Negro that I 
have found two or three handsome ones, one of which (a fine Cattleya, appar¬ 
ently new) I have sent alive to England. Gardeners’ plants, in short, scarcely 
exist on the Amazon, where all that is not water is forest, lofty, uninterrupted 
forest, and the very weeds are trees twenty and thirty feet high. Were hand¬ 
some plants even numerous, the very slow and unsafe modes of communication 
with the interior, and the little ‘ bothering ’ vessels which are the only means 
of carriage from Para to England (and have their decks mostly crowded with 
tigers, snakes, monkeys and other pests to society), render the risk of sending 
anything alive to England very great. Then this is the most wretched country in 
the world for getting a man to do a job of any sort. It is a country of slaves 
(and no white man will work where there are blacks to work), but in this 
province slaves are very scarce, and the consequence is that hardly anything is 
done that ought to be done. The Indian population is not so absolutely com¬ 
pelled to work as it was under the Portuguese regime, and as property is a thing 
unknown to them (what an advantage it is to a country to have in it a certain 
number of men poor enough to be glad of a job of work), they prefer the 
precarious existence afforded by the woods and rivers, with independence, to 
working for the whites, and gaining money and clothes ; and who can blame 
them ? I had a crew of six Indians to bring me up the Rio Negro from the 
Barra ; to obtain these I had to send a thousand miles and wait three months, 
Such are some of the drawbacks and difficulties which have weighed against me, 
to which may be added the great difficulty of collecting, the necessity of cutting 
your way through the forest, of climbing or cutting down immense trees, and 
of preserving what you have collected, for in certain states of the weather 
specimens mould and fall in pieces, notwithstanding all your vigilance. 
