Note 187 — Chapter II
Reading edition
Dr. Gardner, who looked at these things with the eye of a botanist, says that near Rio de Janeiro the heat and moisture are sufficient to compensate even the poorest soil; so that ‘rocks, on which scarcely a trace of earth is to be observed, are covered with vellozias, tillandsias, melastomaceæ, cacti, orchideæ, and ferns, and all in the vigour of life.’ Gardner's Travels in Brazil, p. 9. See also on this combination, Walsh's Brazil, vol. ii. pp. 297, 298, a curious description of the rainy season: ‘For eight or nine hours a day, during some weeks, I never had a dry shirt on me; and the clothes I divested myself of at night, I put on quite wet in the morning. When it did not rain, which was very rare, there shone out in some places a burning sun; and we went smoking along, the wet exhaling by the heat, as if we were dissolving into vapour.’