add a melancholy interest to their extinction. The Indians of the Amazons valley appear to be much superior, both physically and intellectually, to those of South Brazil and of most other parts of South America. Their superb figures generally equal the finest statues in beauty of outline; their broad chests exhibit a splendid series of convex undulations without a hollow in any part of it. The sons of a delicious climate, their bodies, invigorated by exercise, and enjoying from infancy an unconstrained liberty of action, show the perfection to which the human form may attain when circumstances favour its development. Such is the number of their tribes that Mr. Wallace enumerates no less than thirty along the bank of the River Uaupes, one of the tributaries of the Rio Negro, having almost all of them some peculiarities of language and custom, but all going under the general name of Uaupes, and distinguishing themselves as a body from the inhabitants of other rivers. All these tribes construct their dwellings after one plan, which is peculiar to them. Their houses, formed in the shape of a parallelogram with a semicircle at one end, are the abode of numerous families, sometimes of a whole tribe. The roof is supported on the columnar trunks of palm trees. In the centre a clear opening is left, twenty feet wide, and on the sides are little partitions of palm-leaf thatch, dividing off rooms for the several families. These houses are built with much labour and skill; the main supports, beams, rafters, and other parts, are straight, well-proportioned to the strength required, and bound together with split creepers, in a manner that a sailor would admire. The thatch is of the leaf of some one of the numerous palms so well adapted to the purpose, and is laid on with great compactness and regularity. The walls, which are very low, are formed also of palm-thatch, but so thick and so well bound together that neither arrow nor bullet will penetrate it. At the gable end is a large doorway, from the top of which hangs a palm mat, supported by a pole during the day, and let down at night. A smaller door at the semicircular end is the private entrance of the chief, to whom this part of the house exclusively belongs. The furniture consists principally of hammocks, made of string twisted from the fibres of the leaves of the Mauritia flexuosa, of pots and cooking utensils made of baked clay, and of great quantities of small saucer-shaped baskets.