ettes. It is the inner bark of a tree, which separates into thin papery layers. Many trees yield it, amongst them the Courataria Guianensis and the Sapucaya nut-tree (Lecythis ollaria), both belonging to the same natural order. The bark is cut in long strips, of a breadth suitable for folding the tobacco; the inner portion is then separated, boiled, hammered with a wooden mallet, and exposed to the air for a few hours. Some kinds have a reddish colour and an astringent taste, but the sort prepared by our host was of a beautiful satiny-white hue, and perfectly tasteless. He obtained sixty, eighty, and sometimes a hundred layers from the same strip of bark. The best tobacco in Brazil is grown in the neighbourhood of Borba, on the Madeira, where the soil is a rich black loam; but tobacco of very good quality was grown by Joao Trinidade and his neighbours along this coast, on similar soil. It is made up into slender rolls, an inch and a half in diameter, and six feet in length, tapering at each end. When the leaves are gathered and partially dried, layers of them, after the midribs are plucked out, are placed on a mat and rolled up into the required shape. This is done by the women and children, who also manage the planting, weeding, and gathering of the tobacco. The process of tightening the rolls is a long and heavy task, and can be done only by men. The cords used for this purpose are of very great strength. They are made of the inner bark of a peculiar light-wooded and siender tree, called Uaissima, which yields, when beaten out, a great quantity of most beautiful silky fibre, many feet in length. I think this might be turned to some use by English manufacturers, if they could obtain it in large quantity. The tree is abundant on light soils on the southern side of the Lower Amazons, and grows very rapidly. When the rolls are sufficiently well pressed, they are bound round with narrow thongs of remarkable toughness cut from the bark of the climbing Jacitara palm-tree (Desmoncus macracanthus), and are then ready for sale or use.

A narrow channel runs close by this house, which communicates at a distance of six hours’ journey (about eighteen miles) with the Urubu, a large and almost unknown river, flowing through the interior of Guiana. Our host told me the Urubt presented an expanse of clear dark water, in some places a league in width, and was surrounded by an undulating country, partly forest and partly campo. Its banks are fringed with white sandy beaches, and peopled only by a few families of Miira savages. The family now in his employ, and who were living gipsy fashion, the only way they can be induced to live, under a wretched shed on his grounds, were brought from this river six months previously. The channel was navigable by montarias only in the rainy season; it was now a half-dry watercourse, the mouth lying about eight feet above the present level of the Amazons. The principal mouth of the Urubt lies between this place and Serpa. The river communicates with the lake of Saraca, but I could make out nothing clearly as to its precise geographical relations with that large sheet of water, which is ten or twelve leagues in length and one to two in breadth, and has an old-established Brazilian settlement, called Silves, on its banks.

It was very pleasant to roam in our host’s cacaoal. The ground was clear of underwood, the trees were about thirty feet in height, and

formed a dense shade. ‘Two species of monkey frequented the trees, and I was told committed great depredations when the fruit was ripe. One of these, the macaco prego (Cebus cirrhifer?), is a most impudent thief: it destroys more than it eats, by its random, hasty way of plucking and breaking the fruits, and when about to return to the forest carries away all it can in its hands or under its arms. The other species, the pretty little Chrysothrix sciureus, contents itself with devouring what it can on the spot. A variety of beautiful insects basked on the foliage, where stray gleams of sunlight glanced-through the canopy of broad soft-green leaves; numbers of an elegant long-legged tiger-beetle (Odontocheila egregia) ran and flew about over the herbage. It belongs to a sub-genus peculiar to the warmest parts of America, the species of which are found only in the shade of the forest, and are seen quite as frequently pursuing their prey on trees and herbage as on the ground. The typical tiger-beetles, or Cicindelz, inhabit only open and sunny situations, and are wholly terrestrial in their habits. They are the sole forms of the family which occur in the northern and central parts of Europe and North America. In the Amazons region, the shade-loving and semi-arboreal Odontocheilz outnumber in species the Cicindele as twenty-two to six; all but one of this number are exclusively peculiar to the Amazonian forests, and this affords another proof of the adaptation of the Fauna to a forest-clad country, pointing to a long and uninterrupted existence of land covered by forests on this part of the earth’s surface.

We left this place on the 8th of January, and on the afternoon of the gth arrived at Matari, a miserable little settlement of Mura Indians. Here we again anchored and went ashore. The place consisted of about twenty slightly-built mud hovels, and had a most forlorn appearance, notwithstanding the luxuriant forest in its rear. A horde of these Indians settled here many years ago, on the site of an abandoned missionary station, and the government had lately placed a resident director over them, with the intention of bringing the hitherto intractable savages under authority. This, however, seemed to promise no other result than that of driving them to their old solitary haunts, on the banks of the interior waters, for many families had already withdrawn themselves. The absence of the usual cultivated trees and plants gave the place a naked and poverty-stricken aspect. I entered one of the hovels, where several women were employed cooking a meal. Portions of a large fish were roasting over a fire made in the middle of the low chamber, and the entrails were scattered about the floor, on which the women with their children were squatted. These had a timid, distrustful expression of countenance, and their bodies were begrimed with black mud, which is smeared over the skin as a protection against mosquitoes. The children were naked; the women wore petticoats of coarse cloth, ragged round the edges, and stained in blotches with murixi, a dye made from the bark ofa tree. One of them wore a necklace of monkey’s teeth. There were scarcely any household utensils; the place was bare, with the exception of two dirty grass hammocks hung in the corners. I missed the usual mandioca sheds

behind the house, with their surrounding cotton, cacao, coffee, and lemon trees. Two or three young men of the tribe were lounging about the low open doorway. They were stoutly-built fellows, but less well-proportioned than the semi-civilised Indians of the Lower Amazons generally are. Their breadth of chest was remarkable, and their arms were wonderfully thick and muscular. The legs appeared short in proportion to the trunk; the expression of their countenances was unmistakably more sullen and brutal, and the skin of a darker hue, than is common in the Brazilian red man. Before we left the hut an old couple came in; the husband carrying his paddle, bow, arrow, and harpoon, the woman bent beneath the weight of a large basket filled with palm fruits. The man was of low stature, and had a wild appearance from the long coarse hair which hung over his forehead. Both his lips were pierced with holes, as is usual with the older Muras seen on the river. They used formerly to wear tusks of the wild hog in these holes whenever they went out to encounter strangers or their enemies in war. The gloomy savagery, filth, and poverty of the people in this place made me feel quite melancholy, and I was glad to return to the canoe. They offered us no civilities; they did not even pass the ordinary salutes, which all the semi-civilised and many savage Indians proffer on a first meeting. The men persecuted Penna for cashaca, which they seemed to consider the only good thing the white man brings with him. As they had nothing whatever to give in exchange, Penna declined to supply them. ‘They followed us as we descended to the port, becoming very troublesome when about a dozen had collected together. They brought their empty bottles with them, and promised fish and turtle if we would only trust them first with the coveted aguardente, or cau-im, as they calledit. Penna was inexorable: he ordered the crew to weigh anchor, and the disappointed savages remained hooting after us with all their might, from the top of the bank, as we glided away. The Muras have a bad reputation all over this part of the Amazons, the semi-civilised Indians being quite as severe upon them as the white settlers. Every one spoke of them as lazy, thievish, untrustworthy, and cruel. They have a greater repugnance than any other class of Indians to settled habits, regular labour, and the service of the whites; their distaste, in fact, to any approximation towards civilised life is invincible. Yet most of these faults are only an exaggeration of the fundamental defects of character in the Brazilian red man. There is nothing, I think, to show that the Muras had a different origin from the nobler agricultural tribes belonging to the Tupi nation, to some of whom they are close neighbours, although the yery striking contrast in their characters and habits would suggest the conclusion that they had, in the same way as the Semangs of Malacca, for instance, with regard to the Malays. They are merely an offshoot from them, a number of segregated hordes becoming degraded by a residence most likely of very many centuries in Ygap6 lands, confined to a fish diet, and obliged to wander constantly in search of food. Those tribes which are supposed to be more nearly related to the Tupis are distinguished by their settled agricultural habits, their living in well-constructed houses, their practice

of many arts, such as the manufacture of painted earthenware, weaving, and their general custom of tattooing, social organisation, obedience to chiefs, and so forth. The Mtiras have become a nation of nomade fishermen, ignorant of agriculture and all other arts practised by their neighbours. They do not build substantial and fixed dwellings, but live in separate families or small hordes, wandering from place to place along the margins of those rivers and lakes which most abound in fish and turtle. At each resting-place they construct temporary huts at the edge of the stream, shifting them higher or lower on the banks, as the waters advance or recede. Their canoes originally were made simply of the thick bark of trees, bound up into a semi-cylindrical shape by means of woody lianas; these are now rarely seen, as most families possess montarias, which they have contrived to steal from the settlers from time totime. Their food is chiefly fish and turtle, which they are very expert in capturing. It is said by their neighbours that they dive after turtles, and succeed in catching them by the legs, which I believe is true in the shallow lakes where turtles are imprisoned in the dry season. They shoot fish with bow and arrow, and have no notion of any other method of cooking it than by roasting. It is not quite clear whether the whole tribe were originally quite ignorant of agriculture, as some families on the banks of the streams behind Villa Nova, who could scarcely have acquired the art in recent times, plant mandioca; but, as a general rule, the only vegetable food used by the Muras is bananas and wild fruits. The original home of this tribe was the banks of the Lower Madeira. It appears they were hostile to the European settlers from the beginning; plundering their sitios, waylaying their canoes, and massacring all who fell into their power. About fifty years ago the Portuguese succeeded in turning the warlike propensities of the Munduructs against them; and these, in the course of many years’ persecution, greatly weakened the power of the tribe, and drove a great part of them from their seats on the banks of the Madeira. The Muras are now scattered in single hordes and families over a wide extent of country bordering the main river from Villa Nova to Catua, near Ega, a distance of 800 miles. Since the disorders of 1835-6, when they committed great havoc amongst the peaceable settlements from Santarem to the Rio Negro, and were pursued and slaughtered in great numbers by the Munduructis in alliance with the Brazilians, they have given no serious trouble.

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