Having devoted much of my leisure time, during the course of a medical education, to the study of Natural History generally, but more particularly to Botany; and my mind being excited by the glowing descriptions which Humboldt and other travellers have given of the beauty and variety of the natural productions of tropical countries, the magnificence of their mountain scenery, and the splendour of their skies, an ardent desire seized me to travel in such regions. My early patron and teacher in Botany, Sir William J. Hooker, then professor of that science in the University of Glasgow, aware of my wishes, strongly recommended a voyage to some part of South America; and Brazil was fixed on as the best field for my researches, as the vegetable productions of that immense empire were then less known to the English botanist than those perhaps of any other country of equal size in the world. It was true that it had been visited both by German and French naturalists, but no Englishmen, with the exception of Cunningham and Bowie, and the intrepid Burchell, had penetrated into the interior; whole provinces, particularly in the north, still lay open as virgin fields for the investigations of some future traveller; and these I was desirous to explore. The preparations necessary for such an undertaking having been completed, I left Glasgow on the 14th of May, 1836, and on the 20th of the same month embarked at Liverpool, on board the barque Memnon, bound for Rio de Janeiro, the capital of Brazil. The voyage across the Atlantic to South America has been too often described for me to say more than that we had a fair share of calms and squalls, of bright skies and brilliant sunsets, of sharks and whales, flying fishes, and phosphorescent waves. A tedious, but not unpleasant voyage, brought us in sight of land on the 22nd of July. When day broke, Cape Frio, as had been predicted by the captain, was seen, bearing N.N.E., about twenty-five miles distant. This Cape is about seventy miles to the eastward of Rio de Janeiro, and a range of high undulating hills stretches between them, covered to their topmost ridge with trees. On their summits, numerous Palms, with their slender shafts surmounted by a ball-like mass of leaves, rising far above the other denizens of the forest, and standing boldly out in relief against a beautiful blue sky, give a marked character to the scene, and silently proclaim to the European his approach to a world the vegetation of which is very different from that of the one he has so recently left. The winds were light all day, and as we sailed close along the coast, my eye, through the medium of the ship’s telescope, was constantly surveying the wild but beautiful scene, and in imagination I was already revelling amid its multiform natural productions.