rocks, over which the surge raged furiously. Raimundo sat at the stern, rigid and silent; his eye steadily watching the prow of the boat. It was almost worth the risk and discomfort of the passage to witness — the seamanlike ability displayed by Indians on the water. The little boat rode beautifully, rising well with each wave, and in the course of an hour and a half we arrived at Caripi, thoroughly tired and wet through to the skin. I will here make a few observations regarding the Paca and the ‘Cutia, although there is little to relate of their habits in addition to what is contained in natural history books. The Paca is the Ccelogenys Paca of zoologists, and the Cutia the Dasyprocta Aguti, or a local variety of that species. Both differ much from our hare and rabbit, which belong to the same order of animals, their fur being coarse and bristly, and their ears short and broad. ‘Their flesh is widely different in taste from that of our English Rodents. The meat of the Paca, in colour, grain, and flavour, resembles young pork; it is much drier, however, and less palatable than pork. The skin is thick, and boils down to a jelly, when it makes a capital soup with rice. Both animals live exclusively in the forests, both dry and moist, being found, perhaps, most abundantly in the ygapos and islands. When these are flooded in the wet season, they escape to the drier lands by swimming across the intervening channels. At Murucupi I saw several semi-domesticated individuals of both species, which had been caught when young, and were suffered to run freely about the houses. The Paca was not so familiar as the Cutia, which generally makes use of a hole or a box in a corner for a hiding place, and comes out readily to be fed by children. I once saw a tame Cutia running about the woods, nibbling the fruits fallen from the Inaja palm-tree (Maximiliana regia), and when I tried to catch it, instead of betaking itself to the thicket, it ran off to the house of its owners, which was about two hundred yards off. When feeding, this species sometimes sits upright, and takes its food in the forepaws like a squirrel. The Paca and the Cutia belong to a peculiar family of the Rodent order which is confined to South America, and which connects the Rodents to the Pachydermata, the order to which the elephant, horse, and hog belong. One of the principal points of distinction from other families is the strong, blunt form of the claws, which in one of the forms (the Capybara) are very broad, and approximate in shape to the hoofs of the Pachydermata. On this account the family is named by some authors Subungulati; the great division of mammalian animals to which the Pachydermata belong being called, in the classifications of the best author, Ungulata, after the hoofed feet, which are considered their leading character. It is an interesting fact that the pachydermatous animal most nearly allied to the Rodents is also American, although found only in the fossil state—namely, the Toxodon, which Professor Owen states resembled the Rodentia in its dentition. The Toxodon, on the other hand, was nearly related to the elephant, of which the same distinguished zoologist says, ‘‘ Several particulars in its organisation indicate an affinity to the Rodentia.” ‘These facts impart a high degree of interest to these semi-hoofed American Rodents, because

they make it probable that these animals are the living representatives, albeit somewhat modified, of a group which existed at a former distant epoch in the world’s history, and which possessed a structure partaking of the characters of the two great orders, Rodentia and Pachydermata, now so widely distinct in the majority of their forms. I believe that no remains of the order Toxodontia, or of the Rodent family Subungulati, have been found fossil in any other part of the world besides America. In this sort of question it is unsafe to found generalisations on negative evidence; but does not this tend to show that the great section of mammals to which the Pachydermata belong had its origin on that part of the earth’s surface where South America now stands?

On the 16th of January the dry season came abruptly to an end. The sea-breezes, which had been increasing in force for some days, suddenly ceased, and the atmosphere became misty; at length heavy clouds collected where a uniform blue sky had for many weeks prevailed, and down came a succession of heavy showers, the first of which lasted a whole day and night. This seemed to give a new stimulus to animal life. On the first night there was a tremendous uproar—tree-frogs, crickets, goat-suckers, and owls all joining to perform a deafening concert. One kind of goat-sucker kept repeating at intervals throughout the night a phrase similar to the Portuguese words, “Joad corta pao,’—John, cut wood”; a phrase which forms the Brazilian name of the bird. An owl in one of the Genipapa trees muttered now and then a succession of syllables resembling the word ‘‘Murucututi.” Sometimes the croaking and hooting of frogs and toads were so loud that we could not hear one another’s voices within doors. Swarms of dragonflies appeared in the daytime about the pools of water created by the rain, and ants and termites came forth in the winged state in vast numbers. I noticed that the winged termites, or white ants, which came by hundreds to the lamps at night, when alighting on the table often jerked off their wings by a voluntary movement. On examination I found that the wings were not shed by the roots, for a small portion of the stumps remained attached to the thorax. The edge of the fracture was in all cases straight, not ruptured: there is, in fact, a natura! seam crossing the member towards its root, and at this point the long wing naturally drops or is jerked off when the. insect has no further use for it. The white ant is endowed with wings simply for the purpose of flying away from the colony, peopled by its wingless companions, to pair with individuals of the same or other colonies, and thus propagate and disseminate its kind. The winged individuals are males and females, whilst the great bulk of their wingless fraternity are of no sex, and are restricted to the functions of building the nests, nursing and defending the young brood. ‘The two sexes mate whilst on the ground after the wings are shed; and then the married couples, if they escape the numerous enemies which lie in wait for them, proceed to the task of founding new colonies. Ants and white ants have much that is analogous in their modes of life: they belong, however, to two widely different orders of insects, strongly contrasted in their structure and manner of growth.

In some respects the termites are more wonderful than the ants, but I shall reserve an account of them for another chapter.

I amassed at Caripi a very large collection of beautiful and curious insects, amounting altogether to about twelve hundred species. ‘The number of Coleoptera was remarkable, seeing that this order is so - poorly represented near Para. I attributed their abundance to the number of new clearings made in the virgin forest by the native settlers. The felled timber attracts lignivorous insects, and these draw in their train the predaceous species of various families. As a general rule the species were smaller and much less brilliant in colours than those of Mexico and South Brazil. The species, too, although numerous, were not represented by great numbers of individuals; they were also extremely nimble, and therefore much less easy of capture than insects of the same order in temperate climates. On the sandy beach I found two species of Tetracha, a genus of tiger-beetles, which have remarkably large heads, and are found only in hot climates. They come forth at night, in the daytime remaining hid in their burrows several inches deep in the light soil. Their powers of running exceed everything I witnessed in this style of insect locomotion. ‘They run in a serpentine course over the smooth sand, and when closely pursued by the fingers in the endeavour to seize them, are apt to turn suddenly back, and thus baffle the most practised hand and eye. I afterwards became much interested in these insects on several accounts, one of which was that they afforded an illustration of a curious problem in natural history. One of the Caripi species (T. nocturna of Dejean) was of a pallid hue like the sand over which it ran; the other was a brilliant copper-coloured kind (T. pallipes of Klug). Many insects whose abode is the sandy beach are white in colour; I found a large earwig and a mole-cricket of this hue very common in these localities. Now it has been often said, when insects, lizards, snakes, and other animals are coloured so as to resemble the objects on which they live, that such is a provision of nature, the assimilation of colours being given in order to conceal the creatures from the keen eyes of insectivorous birds and other animals. This is no doubt the right view, but some authors have found a difficulty in the explanation on account of this assimilation of colours being exhibited by some kinds and not by others living in company with them; the dress of some species being in striking contrast to the colours of their dwelling-place. One of our Tetrachas is coloured to resemble the sand, whilst its sister species is a conspicuous object on the sand; the white species, it may be mentioned, being much more swift of foot than the copper-coloured one. The margins of these sandy beaches are frequented throughout the fine season by flocks of sandpipers, who search for insects on moonlit nights as well as by day. If one species of insect obtains immunity from their onslaughts by its deceptive resemblance to the sandy surface on which it runs, why is not its sister species endowed in the same way? ‘The answer is, that the dark-coloured kind has means of protection of quite a different nature, and therefore does not need the peculiar mode of disguise enjoyed by its companion. When handled it emits a strong, offensive, putrid and musky odour, a property which the pale kind does not exhibit. Thus

we see that the fact of some species not exhibiting the same adaptation of colours to dwelling-places as their companion species does not throw doubt on the explanation given of the adaptation, but is rather confirmatory of it. The carnivorous beetles at Caripi were, like those of Para, chiefly arboreal. Some were found under the bark of trees (Coptodera, Goniotropis, Morio, etc.), others running over the slender twigs, branches and leaves (Ctenostoma, Lebia, Calophzena, Lia, etc.), and many were concealed in the folds of leaves (Calleida, Agra, etc.). Most of them exhibited a beautiful contrivance for enabling them to cling to and run over smooth or flexible surfaces, such as leaves. Their tarsi or feet are broad, and furnished beneath with a brush of short, stiff hairs; whilst their claws are toothed in the form of a comb, adapting them for clinging to the smooth edges of leaves, the joint of the foot which precedes the claw being cleft so as to allow free play to the claw in grasping. ‘The common dung-beetles at Caripi, which flew about in the evening like the Geotrupes, the familiar “‘ shard-borne beetle with his drowsy hum” of our English lanes, were of colossal size and beautiful colours. One kind had a long spear-shaped horn projecting from the crown of its head (Phanezeus lancifer). A blow from this fellow, as he came heavily flying along, was never very pleasant. All the tribes of beetles which feed on vegetable substances, fresh or decayed, were very numerous. The most beautiful of these, but not the most common, were the Longicornes; very graceful insects, having slender bodies and long antennz, often ornamented with fringes and tufts of hair. They were found on flowers, on trunks of trees, or flying about the new clearings. One small species (Coremia hirtipes) has a tuft of hairs on its hind legs, whilst many of its sister species have a similar ornament on the antennz. It suggests curious reflections when we see an ornament like the feather of a grenadier’s cap situated on one part of the body in one species, and on a totally different part in nearly allied ones. I tried in vain to discover the use of these curious brushlike decorations. On the trunk of a living leguminous tree, Petzell found a number of very rare and handsome species, the Platysternus hebreeus, which is of a broad shape, coloured ochreous, but spotted and striped with black, so as to resemble a domino. On the felled trunks of trees, swarms of gilded-green Longicornes occurred, of small size (Chrysoprasis), which looked like miniature musk-beetles, and, indeed, are Closely allied to those well-known European insects.

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