We Walked For Some Hours Under The Shade Of These Arcades, Which Scarcely Admit A Glimpse Of The Sky; The Latter Appeared To Me Of An Indigo Blue, The Deeper In Shade Because The Green Of The Equinoctial Plants Is Generally Of A Stronger Hue, With Somewhat Of A Brownish Tint.

A great fern tree,* (* Possibly our Aspidium caducum.) very different from the Polypodium arboreum of the West Indies, rose above masses of scattered rocks.

In this place we were struck for the first time with the sight of those nests in the shape of bottles, or small bags, which are suspended from the branches of the lowest trees, and which attest the wonderful industry of the orioles, which mingle their warbling with the hoarse cries of the parrots and the macaws. These last, so well known for their vivid colours, fly only in pairs, while the real parrots wander about in flocks of several hundreds. A man must have lived in those regions, particularly in the hot valleys of the Andes, to conceive how these birds sometimes drown with their voices the noise of the torrents, which dash down from rock to rock.

We left the forests, at the distance of somewhat more than a league from the village of San Fernando. A narrow path led, after many windings, into an open but extremely humid country. In such a site in the temperate zone, the cyperaceous and gramineous plants would have formed vast meadows; here the soil abounded in aquatic plants, with sagittate leaves, and especially in basil plants, among which we noticed the fine flowers of the costus, the thalia, and the heliconia.

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