Untitled - The Alfred Russel Wallace Website

48
NOTES OF A BOTANIST
was sometimes sensible enough, but I could not
take my thermometer in my excursions to the
highest points.
. . .
I have been much interested to meet here
several tribes of plants which I had not seen since
leaving England. I have got, for instance, a
Poppy, a Horsetail, a Bramble, a Sanicle (exceedingly
like your common wood Sanicle), some shrubs
of the Bilberry tribe with edible fruit similar to
that of the English species, a Buttercup (very like
the minute Ranunculus hederaceus which grows by
Ganthorpe Spring), a Hydrocotyle rather smaller
than the Hydrocotyle vulgaris whose round shining
leaves you must have noticed in boggy parts of
Welburn Moor, a Chaffweed like the minute
Centunculus minimus which grows rarely on Stockton
Common, and some others. In a deep dell on
the way to Moyobamba I was delighted to find a
few specimens of that rare plant the Chickweed :
its seeds had most likely been brought in the dung
of mules which travel that way. .
. .
[The following letter now takes up
the narrative
from the point of view of the botanical collector :
To Mr. George Bent-ham
TARAPOTO, PERU, Dec. 25, 1855.
... I did not get away from Yurimaguas till
the 1 2th of June, and on the 2ist reached the end
of my long voyage. Yurimaguas
has the most
equable temperature I have anywhere experienced,
the thermometer sometimes not varying more than
8 in twenty-four hours, but I have found no place
so relaxing, and the addition of a severe attack of
]