On the first day’s journey with our new companion we travelled about seven leagues, five of which were accomplished in the morning, and two in the evening. The Villa de Icó is in a southerly direction, bearing a little to the west of Aracaty, the distance between them being about two hundred and forty miles. The Senhors Pinto accomplished the journey in five days and a half, but it took me three days longer; which delay I did not regret, as I travelled more at my ease, and was enabled to make collections by the way, that I could not have done had I accompanied them. On this day’s journey I observed that the country was gradually rising; where visible, the soil consisted of a reddish coloured clay, but many large tracts were covered with gravel which gave them the appearance of having been at one time the bed of an immense river. In other places beds of gneiss, forming elevated ridges were seen cropping out, the strata being nearly vertical. About half an hour after we began our journey, we passed a large lake on the left side of the road, called Lagoa grande; it is about a league long, and nearly as much broad, and abounds in fish and wild duck. Carnahuba palms were now becoming less frequent, but they were succeeded by a vegetation of a very opposite character; in situations somewhat sandy, a dwarf kind of _Cassia_ often occurs, as well as two or three species of _Croton_, but these, in common with the herbaceous vegetation, were already much scorched up; in the gravelly places the principal production is a beautiful erect species of _Evolvulus_ about a foot high, with small leaves and numerous blue flowers, giving it much the appearance of the common flax. On the more elevated tracts, woods are seen consisting of low trees and shrubs, principally a subarboreous species of _Mimosa_, and a _Combretum_; these woods are nearly all deciduous, the heat and drought producing the same effect on their foliage, as the cold in northern regions, these are called by the inhabitants _Catingas_; no large trees are to be seen, but in the more open parts of the country, a low wide-spreading species of the _Chrysobalanaceous_ tribe is not uncommon, affording shade not only to travellers, but to the cattle which pasture in those districts; it was under one of these trees that we halted during the heat of the day, and dined on part of a large green lizard that I shot the evening before.