My dear Lyell

I thank you much for sending me Madame Agassiz’s letter to Mary, which I have read with much curiosity and interest.² The variety of new fish and other novelties which Agassiz has discovered are not half so astonishing to me as the rapid growth of that country.³ How completely Brazil seems to be revolutionized by the one single agency of steam. Madame Agassiz speaks of the voyage from Para to the Barra de Rio Negro taking five days;⁴ when the botanist Spruce explored that country, no longer ago than 1850, the voyage from Para to Santorin, which is little more than half way to the Barra, often required a month. ⁵ Still, I should have more confidence in observations made by men who have been a long time stationary in chosen spots, like Bates and Wallace and Spruce, than in those made at steam pace.⁶

Agassiz’s observation on “glacial phenomena,” in Brazil are certainly very astonishing indeed; so astonishing that I have very great difficulty in believing them.⁷ They shake my faith in the glacial system altogether;—or perhaps they ought rather to shake the faith in Agassiz. They seem to threaten a reductio ad absurdum of the whole theory. If Brazil was ever covered with glaciers, I can see no reason why the whole earth should not have been so. Probably the whole terrestrial globe was once “one entire and perfect icicle.”⁸ Seriously,—to answer your questions;—there is nothing in the least northern, nothing that is not characteristically Brazillian, in the flora of the Organ mountains.⁹ I did not myself ascend any of the peaks, but Gardner did, and made very rich collections, of which he has given an account in Sir W. Hooker’s Journal, and more compendiously in his volume of Travels.¹⁰ The vegetation consists of very curious dwarfish forms of those families and genera which are characteristic of tropical America, and especially of Brazil; together with representatives of some other groups which are widely diffused, but by no means northern. So also the vegetation of the table lands has many peculiar forms, but is composed mainly of under-shrubby and herbaceous species, of the same families and genera which in the forests appear as trees and tall climbers.¹¹

Certainly, IF Brazil was ever covered with glaciers it seems to me certain that the whole of the tropical flora must have come into existence since. I also think it clear, on the same IF, that the absence of “glacial action” from Southern Europe must be due to some other cause than climate.¹²

Again, to answer your last question.— Brazil (I speak not merely of the small part which I saw, but of what I have read of, and I have read a good many books of travels in that country), seems to be very deficient in lakes, with the exception of lagoons (“broads” they would be called in Norfolk), on the coast; of these there are plenty, but they are evidently formed in the same way as the Norfolk broads, by the natural damming up of the outfall of the abundant waters. Where I travelled, in the higher lands of the interior, the running streams were absolutely innumerable, but scarcely so much as a permanent pond to be seen.¹³

Many thanks to dear Mary for her kind message.¹⁴ With much love to her, believe me ever

Your affectionate friend | Charles J. F. Bunbury

I think Joseph Hooker will be as sceptical as myself about the glaciation of Brazil.¹⁵