not want for food. The fathers cultivated maize, French beans, and other European vegetables. They even planted sweet oranges and tamarinds round the villages; and they possessed twenty or thirty thousand head of cows and horses in the savannas of Atures and Carichana.... Since the year 1795, the cattle of the Jesuits have entirely disappeared. There now remain as monuments of the ancient cultivation of these countries, and the active industry of the first missionaries, only a few trunks of the orange and tamarind in the savannas, surrounded by wild trees.”[92] Our walk through the little village of Sourés brought us to the low cliffs on the shore, which we had already seen from the steamer. The same formations prevail all along the coast of this island that we have found everywhere on the banks of the Amazons. Lowest, a well-stratified, rather coarse sandstone, immediately above which, and conformable with it, are finely laminated clays, covered by a crust. Upon this lies the highly ferruginous sandstone, in which an irregular cross stratification frequently alternates with the regular beds; above this, following all the undulations of its surface, is the well-known reddish sandy clay, with quartz pebbles scattered through its mass, and only here and there faint traces of an indistinct stratification. This afternoon Mr. Agassiz has been again on shore, examining the formation of both banks of the Igarapé Grande, the river at the mouth of which stands the town of Sourés. He has returned delighted with the result of his day’s work, having not only obtained the most complete evidence that the geological formation of Marajo corresponds exactly with that of the Amazonian Valley, but having also obtained some very important data with respect to the present encroachments of the sea upon the shore. He found upon the beach, partially covered by sea-sand, the remains of a forest which evidently grew in a peat-bog, and which the ocean is gradually laying bare.