Lying almost entirely within the torrid zone, the climate of Brazil is naturally a very hot one, and is also extremely humid, the rainfall for the year at Maranhão amounting to the enormous total of two hundred and eighty inches, or seven times greater than that of New York. Such an excess of moisture has a corresponding effect upon its plant life, and has given Brazil a wealth of vegetation not excelled by any country of the world. Travellers assert that it is utterly beyond description, and that in the ravines and passes near the coast, where the humidity is intense, it defies man’s utmost efforts at restraint. Even as far south as Rio, trees split for palings send forth shoots and branches immediately; and on the banks of the Amazon, the level of which mighty stream is yearly raised forty feet by the immense rainfall, the loftiest trees destroy each other by their proximity, and are literally bound together by rich vines and lianes. In the province of Maranhão, the grasses, roots, and other plants extending from the brinks of pools in time weave themselves into vegetable bridges, along which the traveller wends his way, unaware that he has left terra firma until he perceives the scaly jaws of an alligator protruding through the herbage before him. On all sides the vegetation is bewildering, and every representative of plant life is of a gigantic size. But to return to ourselves. Happening to glance ahead a little later we caught a glimpse of the great light-house on the extremity of Cape St. Agostinho just as its beacon flashed over the sea, sending its brilliant needles of light far out over the moon-lit ocean. Just at dusk a large coasting steamer came unexpectedly out from under the hills, in whose stern waved the green-and-gold flag of Brazil; and, heading south across the wide wake of the moon, suddenly vanished in the gloom beyond the sombre headland. The light on Cape St. Agostinho, by the way, can compare favorably with our most powerful ones, for its rays are visible twenty-five miles at sea; the tower being in the form of a white iron tripod one hundred and sixty feet high, whose apex is three hundred and sixty feet above the ocean. Indeed, on the whole of the South American seaboard, from the Guianas to Cape Horn, there is only one other light which equals it, and that is on Cape Frio, just to the eastward of Rio Janeiro.