The town of Barra is built on a tract of elevated, but very uneven land, on the left bank of the Rio Negro, and contained in 1850 about 3,000 inhabitants. There was originally a small fort here, erected by the Portuguese to protect their slave-hunting expeditions amongst the numerous tribes of Indians which peopled the banks of the river. The most distinguished and warlike of these were the Mandos, who had many traits in common with the Omaguas, or Cambevas, of the Upper Amazons, the Munduructs of the Tapajos, the Jurtinas of the Xingu, and other sections of the Tupi nation. The Mandaos were continually at war with the neighbouring tribes, and had the custom of enslaving the prisoners made during their predatory expeditions. The Portuguese disguised their slave-dealing motives under the pretext of ransoming (vesgatando) these captives; indeed, the term vesgatar (to ransom) is still applied by the traders on the Upper Amazons to the very general, but illegal, practice of purchasing Indian children of the wild tribes. The older inhabitants of the place remember the time when many hundreds of these captives were brought down by a single expedition. In 1809, Barra became the chief town of the Rio Negro district;many Portuguese and Brazilians from other provinces then settled here; spacious houses and warehouses were built, and it grew, in the course of thirty or forty years, to be, next to Santarem, the principal settlement

on the banks of the Amazons. At the time of my visit it was on the decline, in consequence of the growing distrust, or increased cunning, of the Indians, who once formed a numerous and the sole labouring class, but having got to know that the laws protected them against forced servitude, were rapidly withdrawing themselves’ from the place. When the new province of the Amazons was established, in 1852, Barra was chosen as the capital, and was then invested with the appropriate name of the city of Mandos.

The situation of the town has many advantages: the climate is healthy; there are no insect pests; the soil is fertile and capable of growing all kinds of tropical produce (the coffee of the Rio Negro, especially, being of very superior quality), and it is near the fork of two great navigable rivers. The imagination becomes excited when one reflects on the possible future of this place, situated near the centre of the equatorial part of South America, in the midst of a region almost as large as Europe, every inch of whose soil is of the most exuberant fertility, and having water communication on one side with the Atlantic, and on the other with the Spanish republics of Venezuela, New Granada, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Barra is now the principal station for the lines of steamers which were established in 1853, and passengers and goods are transhipped here for the Solimoens and Peru. A steamer runs once a fortnight between Parad and Barra, and a bi-monthly one plies between this place and Nauta, in the Peruvian territory. The steamboat company is supported by a large annual grant, about 450,000 sterling, from the imperial government. Barra was formerly a pleasant place of residence, but it is now in a most wretched plight, suffering from a chronic scarcity of the most necessary articles of food. The attention of the settlers was formerly devoted almost entirely to the collection of the spontaneous produce of the forests and rivers; agriculture was consequently neglected, and now the neighbourhood does not produce even mandioca-meal sufficient for its own consumption. Many of the most necessary articles of food, besides all luxuries, come from Portugal, England, and North America. A few bullocks are brought now and then from Obydos, 500 miles off, the nearest place where cattle are reared in any numbers, and these furnish at long intervals a supply of fresh beef, but this is generally monopolised by the families of government officials. Fowls, eggs, fresh fish, turtles, vegetables, and fruit, were excessively scarce and dear in 1859, when I again visited the place: for instance, six or seven shillings were asked for a poor lean fowl, and eggs were twopence half-penny apiece. In fact, the neighbourhood produces scarcely anything; the provincial government is supplied with the greater part of its funds from the treasury of Para; its revenue, which amounts to about 50 contos of reis (45,600), derived from export taxes on the produce of the entire province, not sufficing for more than about one-fifth of its expenditure. The population of the province of the Amazons, according to a census taken in 1858, is 55,000 souls; the municipal district of Barra, which comprises a large area around the capital, containing only 4,500 inhabitants. For the government, however, of this small number of people, an immense staff of officials is gathered together in the capital, and,

notwithstanding the endless number of trivial formalities which Brazilians employ in every small detail of administration, these have nothing to do the greater part of their time. None of the people who flocked to Barra on the establishment of the new government, seemed to care about the cultivation of the soil and the raising of food, although these would have been most profitable speculations. The class of Portuguese who emigrate to Brazil seem to prefer petty trading to the honourable pursuit of agriculture. If the English are a nation of shopkeepers, what are we to say of the Portuguese? I counted in Barra, one store for every five dwelling-houses. These stores, or ¢avernas, have often not more than fifty pounds’ worth of goods for their whole stock; and the Portuguese owners, big lusty fellows, stand all day behind their dirty counters for the sake of selling a few coppers’ worth of liquors, or small wares. These men all give the same excuse for not applying themselves to agriculture—namely, that no hands can be obtained to work on the soil. Nothing can be done with Indians: indeed, they are fast leaving the neighbourhood altogether; and the importation of negro slaves, in the present praiseworthy temper of the Brazilian mind, is out of the question. The problem, how to obtain a labouring class for a new and tropical country, without slavery, has to be solved before this glorious region can become what its delightful climate and exuberant fertility fit it for—the abode of a numerous, civilised, and happy people.

I found at Barra my companion, Mr. Wallace, who, since our joint Tocantins expedition, had been exploring, partly with his brother, lately arrived from England, the north-eastern coast of Marajé, the river Capim (a branch of the Guamd, near Para), Monte Alegre, and Santarem. He had passed us by night below Serpa, on his way to Barra, and so had arrived about three weeks before me. Besides ourselves there were half a dozen other foreigners here congregated— Englishmen, Germans, and Americans; one of them a natural-history collector, the rest traders on the rivers. In the pleasant society of these, and of the family of Senhor Henriques, we passed a delightful time; the miseries of our long river voyages were soon forgotten, and in two or three weeks we began to talk of further explorations. Meantime we had almost daily rambles in the neighbouring forest. The country around Barra is undulating and furrowed by ravines, through which flow rivulets of clear, cold water, along whose banks many picturesque nooks occur. The whole surface of the land, down to the water’s edge, is covered by the uniform dark green rolling forest, the cad-apoam (convex woods) of the Indians, characteristic of the Rio Negro. This clothes also the extensive areas of low land, which are flooded by the river in the rainy season. ‘The olive-brown tinge of the water seems to be derived from the saturation in it of the dark green foliage during these annual inundations. ‘The great contrast in form and colour between the forests of the Rio Negro and those of the Amazons arises from the predominance in each of different families of plants. On the main river palms of twenty or thirty different species form a great proportion of the mass of trees, whilst on the Rio Negro they play a very subordinate part. The characteristic kind in the latter region is the Jaré (Leopoldinia pulchra), a

species not found on the margins of the Amazons, which has a scanty head of fronds, with narrow leaflets of the same dark green hue as the rest of the forest. The stem is smooth, and about two inches in diameter; its height is not more than twelve to fifteen feet; it does not, therefore, rise amongst the masses of foliage of the exogenous trees, so as to form a feature in the landscape, like the broad-leaved Muru-murti and Urucuri, the slender Assai, the tall Jauarf, and the fan-leaved Muruti of the banks of the Amazons. On the shores of the main river the mass of the forest is composed, besides palms, of Leguminosz, or trees of the bean family, in endless variety as to height, shape of foliage, flowers, and fruit; of silk-cotton trees, colossal nut-trees (Lecythidez), and Cecropiz; the underwood and water-frontage consisting in great part of broad-leaved Musacez, Marantacez, and succulent grasses, all of which are of light shades of green. The forests of the Rio Negro are almost destitute of these large-leaved plants and grasses, which give so rich an appearance to the vegetation wherever they grow; the margins of the stream being clothed with bushes or low trees, having the same gloomy monotonous aspect as the mangroves of the shores of creeks near the Atlantic. The uniformly small but elegantly leaved exogenous trees, which constitute the mass of the forest, consist in great part of members of the Laurel, Myrtle, Bignoniaceous, and Rubiaceous orders. The soil is generally a stiff loam, whose chief component part is the Tabatinga clay, which also forms low cliffs on the coast in some places, where it overlies strata of coarse sandstone. ‘This kind of soil, and the same geological formation prevail, as we have seen, in many places on the banks of the Amazons, so that the great contrast in the forest clothing of the two rivers cannot arise from this cause.

I did not stay long enough at Barra to make a large collection of the animal productions of the neighbourhood. I obtained one species of monkey; not more than a dozen birds, and about three hundred species of insects. Judging from these materials, the Fauna appears to have much in common with that of the sea-coast of Guiana; but, at the same time, it contains a considerable number of species not hitherto found in Guiana, or in any other part of South America. The resemblance between the eastern shore of the Rio Negro and the distant coast of Guiana, in this respect, appears to be greater than that between the Rio Negro and the banks of the Upper Amazons.*

The species of monkey mentioned above was rather common in the forest; it is the Midas bicolor of Spix, a kind I had not before met with, and peculiar, as far as at present known, to the eastern bank of the Rio Negro. The colour is brown, with the neck and arms white.

My own material is perhaps not sufficient to establish this view of the relations of the Fauna, for it requires the comparison of an extensive series of species to obtain sound results on such subjects. A few conspicuous instances, however, pointed to the conclusion above mentioned. For example: in birds, the beautiful seven-coloured Tanager, Calliste tatao, the ‘‘ sete cores ” of the Brazilians, a Cayenne bird, is common to Guiana and the neighbourhood of Barra, but does not range farther westward to the banks of the Solimoens; where, from Ega to Tabatinga, the allied form of Calliste Yeni takes its place. The Ramphastos Toco, or Tocano pacova (so named from its beak resembling a banana or pacova), a well-known Guianian bird, is found also at Barra, but not farther west at Ega. In Coleopterous insects such species as

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