Page:The naturalist on the River Amazons 1863 v2.djvu/184

 afterwards learnt that there were not more than eighteen or twenty families settled throughout the whole country from Manacapurú to Quarý, a distance of 240 miles; and these, as before observed, do not live on the banks of the main stream, but on the shores of inlets and lakes.

The fishermen twice brought me small rounded pieces of very porous pumice-stone, which they had picked up floating on the surface of the main current of the river. They were to me objects of great curiosity as being messengers from the distant volcanoes of the Andes: Cotopaxi, Llanganete, or Sangay, which rear their peaks amongst the rivulets that feed some of the early tributaries of the Amazons, such as the Macas, the Pastaza, and the Napo. The stones must have already travelled a distance of 1200 miles. I afterwards found them rather common: the Brazilians use them for cleaning rust from their guns, and firmly believe them to be solidified river foam. A friend once brought me, when I lived at Santarem, a large piece which had been found in the middle of the stream below Monte Alegre, about 900 miles further down the river: having reached this distance, pumice-stones would be pretty sure of being carried out to sea, and floated thence with the north-westerly Atlantic current to shores many thousand miles distant from the volcanoes which ejected them. They are sometimes found stranded on the banks in different parts of the river. Reflecting on this circumstance since I arrived in England, the probability of these porous fragments serving as vehicles for the transportation of seeds of plants, eggs of insects, spawn of fresh-water