trees starting from the clefts of the rocks, dwarfish and distorted:
they afford good, but small fruit, and seem, on the lower parts of
the island, to take the place of the laurels, which confine themselves
to the higher regions, unless cultivated. The road nearer the sea,
however, affords occasionally, in addition, the perfume of the mimosa
comuta, (the seeds of which I suppose have been introduced from
the coast of Africa) delightful at a short distance, but too powerful
when near. The grass, briza media, vulgarly called maidenhair
in England, abounds all over the western side of the island;
nor must I omit to mention the cestrum vespertinum, (bella noite of
the Portuguese) the flowers of which (although it is said to exhale
a noxious odour from its leaves) smell deliciously in the evening.
After passing the valley and torrent, where the arundo sagittata is
thickly planted, the approach and descent to Camera de Lobos
afforded some splendid cacti, rising to the height of small trees,
and with trunks or stems nearly as thick as my body : they were
the loftiest that X had ever seen of that species, with the exception
of those in the Botanic Garden at Lisbon. I should mention,
however, that there is a large mass of basalt in the bed of this
torrent, which is full of small cavities, fined with acicular crystals
of mesotype, interrupted here and there by bi-pyramidal, and prismatic
crystals of carbonate of lime, frequently an inch long. I did
stituted for the thea are, the symplocos cdstonia, which was supposed by Baron de
Humboldt to h9.ye be.en infinitely beneficial to himself and M. Bonpland, from the
favourable action of its astringent and stimulating qualities on the gastric system, and
as a sudorific; they found it a powerful preservative against their frequent exposure
to rain on the Cordillieres: (Plantes GquinomaleSyt. I., p. 185:)—the camellia japonica,
which belongs to the thea^e<^> e^d is much used even in China, and also possessing
astringent and stimulating qualities : the rhamnus teezans, the cussonia paragua, and
the ceg/nothus Americqinus, which are all bitter, styptic, and act upon the nerves ;
whereas the sida, which belongs to the malvace#, is emollient and calming, (Decan-
dolle. Essai sur les Prop. J\ledicales des Plants*}, and did it act like the thea, would
be the first-known exception, to a family which fias a remarkable unity of properties..
not find any rock similar to this in the neighbourhood, and I never
met with mesotype but in this fragment.' Probably, like leucité, it
may only be found in the lower deposits, or those more ancient
streams which have flowed immediately from the mouth of ¿he
crater. I here found two solitary plants of the weld (reseda
tuteóla), neither used by, nor known to the natives. Turning
round to descend into the village of Camera de Lobos (where I
remarked thin flakes of carbonate of lime in the yellow tufa), we
are struck with the gigantic cliff which towers above it, the whole
depth of which, (1600 feet) is one vertical sheet of alternating,
shallow strata of basalt, tufa, and scoriae, ribbed from top to
bottom with narrow dikes of basalt; but I shall return to this cliff
again, in sailing along the shore to the Fazenda dos Padres, and I
will only observe, that it would be an excellent spot for experiments
on the downward velocity of sound. The opposite sketch,
Plate 4, A, was made near the top of the eastern hills, where the
appearance of the church steeple makes the towering grandeur of
the cliff the more striking.
By following the most western of the two roads to the Coural,
by Mr. Veitch’s Quinta (for there is another still more direct,
which does not pass that way), I should not have gone through
Camera de Lobos, which I determined to do, in order to ascend
and measure the Pao branco, the highest point on which I had
observed the vine to be cultivated in this direction. I found it
to be 1922 feet above the sea, and about 158 feet lower than the
bottom of the Coural das Freirás. In ascending the road to the Pao
branco, I found fragments of compact basalt with common pyrites,
(fer sulfuré, H .) which is also found in the conglomerated fragments
beneath the basalt a,t Campanario, mixed with olivine, presenting
the pseudo-metallic colours which mark its decomposing
state. There is a chalybeate spring at Campanario, and also at
Machico, where the specimens are much more beautiftd. The