_Sunday, 31st._—Manaos. We had wished exceedingly to extend our excursion on the Rio Negro to the mouth of the Rio Branco, but our pilot would not undertake to conduct the “Ibicuhy” beyond Pedreira, as he said the stones in the bed of the river were numerous and large and the channel at this season not very deep. We were, therefore, obliged to return without accomplishing the whole object of this voyage; but though short, it was nevertheless most interesting, and has left with us a vivid impression of the peculiar character of this great stream. Beautiful as are the endless forests, however, we could not but long, when skirting them day after day without seeing a house or meeting a canoe, for the sight of tilled soil, for pasture-lands, for open ground, for wheat-fields and haystacks,—for any sign, in short, of the presence of man. As we sat at night in the stern of the vessel, looking up this vast river, stretching many hundred leagues, with its solitary, uninhabited shores and impenetrable forests, it was difficult to resist an oppressive sense of loneliness. Though here and there an Indian settlement or a Brazilian village breaks the distance, yet the population is a mere handful in such a territory. I suppose the time will come when the world will claim it, when this river, where, in a six days’ journey, we have passed but two or three canoes, will have its steamers and vessels of all sorts going up and down, and its banks will be busy with life; but the day is not yet. When I remember the poor people I have seen in the watch-making and lace-making villages of Switzerland, hardly lifting their eyes off their work from break of day till night, and even then earning barely enough to keep them above actual want, and think how easily everything grows here, on land to be had for almost nothing, it seems a pity that some parts of the world should be so overstocked that there is not nourishment for all, and others so empty that there are none to gather the harvest. We long to see a vigorous emigration pour into this region so favored by Nature, so bare of inhabitants. But things go slowly in these latitudes; great cities do not spring up in half a century, as with us. Humboldt, in his account of his South-American journey, writes: “Since my departure from the banks of the Orinoco and the Amazon, a new era has unfolded itself in the social state of the nations of the West. The fury of civil dissensions has been succeeded by the blessings of peace, and a freer development of the arts of industry. The bifurcations of the Orinoco, the isthmus of Tuamini, so easy to be made passable by an artificial canal, will erelong fix the attention of commercial Europe. The Cassiquiare, as broad as the Rhine, and the course of which is one hundred and eighty miles in length, will no longer form uselessly a navigable canal between two basins of rivers which have a surface of one hundred and ninety thousand square leagues. The grain of New Granada