From this distance they look picturesque, with thatched, overhanging roofs, covering a kind of open porch. Just now we passed a cleared nook at the water-side, where a wooden cross marked a single mound. What a lonely grave it seemed! We are now coasting along the Isle of Marajó, keeping up the so-called Pará river; we shall not enter the undisputed waters of the Amazons till the day after to-morrow. This part of the river goes also by the name of the Bay of Marajó. _August 21st._—Last evening we stopped at our first station,—the little town of Breves. Its population, like that of all these small settlements on the Lower Amazons, is made up of an amalgamation of races. You see the regular features and fair skin of the white man combined with the black, coarse, straight hair of the Indian, or the mulatto with partly negro, partly Indian features, but the crisp taken out of the hair; and with these combinations comes in the pure Indian type, with its low brow, square build of face, and straight line of the shoulders. In the women especially the shoulders are rather high. In the first house we entered there was only an old half-breed Indian-woman, standing in the broad open porch of her thatched home, where she seemed to be surrounded with live stock,—parrots and parroquets of all sorts and sizes, which she kept for sale. After looking in at several of the houses, buying one or two monkeys, some parroquets, and some articles of the village pottery, as ugly, I must say, as they were curious, we wandered up into the forest to gather plants for drying. The palms are more abundant, larger, and in greater variety than we have seen them hitherto. At dusk we returned to the steamer, where we found a crowd of little boys and some older members of the village population, with snakes, fishes, insects, monkeys, &c. The news had spread that the collecting of “bixos” was the object of this visit to their settlement, and all were thronging in with their live wares of different kinds. Mr. Agassiz was very much pleased with this first harvest. He added a considerable number of new species to his collection of Amazonian fishes made in Pará, already so full and rare. We remained at the Breves landing all night, and this morning we are steaming along between islands, in a channel which bears the name of the river Aturia. It gives an idea of the grandeur of the Amazons, that many of the channels dividing the islands by which its immense breadth is broken are themselves like ample rivers, and among the people here are known by distinct local names. The banks are flat; we have seen no cliffs as yet, and the beauty of the scenery is wholly in the forest. I speak more of the palms than of other trees, because they are not to be mistaken, and from their peculiar port they stand out in bold relief from the mass of foliage, often rising above it and sharply defined against the sky. There are, however, a host of other