After we had rested for half an hour at the priest’s house, he proposed to send us to his little mandioca plantation at a short distance in the forest, where a particular kind of palm, which Mr. Agassiz greatly coveted, was to be obtained. Such a proposition naturally suggests a walk; but in this country of inundated surfaces land journeys, as will be seen, are often made by water. We started in a montaria, and, after keeping along the river for some time, we turned into the woods and began to navigate the forest. The water was still and clear as glass: the trunks of the trees stood up from it, their branches dipped into it; and as we wound in and out among them, putting aside a bough here and there, or stooping to float under a green arbor, the reflection of every leaf was so perfect that wood and water seemed to melt into each other, and it was difficult to say where the one began and the other ended. Silence and shade so profound brooded over the whole scene that the mere ripple of our paddles seemed a disturbance. After half an hour’s row we came to dry land, where we went on shore, taking our boatmen with us; and the wood soon resounded with the sound of their hatchets, as the palms fell under their blows. We returned with a boat-load of palms, besides a number of plants of various kinds which we had not seen elsewhere. We reached the “Ibicuhy” just in time; for scarcely were we well on board and in snug quarters again, when the heavens opened and the floods came down. I am not yet accustomed to the miraculous force and profusion of these torrents of water, and every shower is a fresh surprise. Yet the rainy season is no such impediment to travelling and working as we had supposed it would be. The rain is by no means continuous, and there are often several days together of clear weather. Indeed, it no more rains all the time in the rainy season here than it snows all the time in the winter with us. One word of the geology. The Pedreira granite, of which we had heard, proves to be a granitoid mica-slate,—a highly metamorphic rock, indistinctly stratified, but resembling granite in its composition. It is in immediate contact with the red drift which rests above it.