Mr. Bartlett Calvert, an English entomologist long resident at Quillota, whose intimate knowledge of the language made it possible for me to organise my camp without any serious difficulties. I received every facility from the Argentine and Chilean Governments in the way of passports, for which I have to express my gratitude to the ministers of both countries, as well as to many kind friends in Chile who did every¬ thing in their power to assist my undertaking, and whose hospitality was far beyond what I had ever previously experienced in any country where I travelled.
From Buenos Ayres to Santiago was now an easy railway journey of three days, broken only by the pass over the Andes between Puente del Inca and Salto de Soldado, which was traversed in one day on mule- back with perfect ease and safety. This journey has been so well described in recent works by Fitzgerald and Sir M. Conway that I need only say that the good hotel at Puente del Inca, at the foot of the great mountain of Aconcagua, affords a delightful resting-place. The few butterflies which I found there seemed to show that there is considerable resemblance between the high Andes in this latitude and the Bolivian Andes, which have been so well explored by Garlepp, and whose lepidoptera have well been described by Staudinger in Iris, VII., p. 43.
After visiting the museum at Santiago, where Dr. Philippi was good enough to allow me to leave my collections to be dried, I first went to the Baños de Cauquenes, which have been described by Darwin and the late John Ball, who visited Chile in 1882 and wrote a book on his journey. The season for plants was here already advanced and the country very dry, but I saw enough to convince me that the evergreen forest which clothes the mountains and extends into the plain farther south had never been present in the outer valleys of the Andes here, though about six hours' ride into the mountains brings you to a valley where Libocedrus chilensis , the Chilean “ cypress,” grows abundantly. The magnificent Puya cærulea (or alpestris), which Miss North has so beautifully painted, was the most striking plant I saw, but orchids were conspicuous by their absence.
I next visited Concepcion and the beautiful gardens of the late Madame Cousino at Lota, also described by Mr. Ball, where I saw for the first time on the hillsides some of the South Chilean plants, and where large plantations of the Californian Pinus insignis are rapidly changing the aspect of the country. Nothing is more surprising in the great central valley of Chile along the line of the railway than the way in which the indigenous vegetation is being supplanted by trees and plants introduced from Europe. The weeping willows are finer than I ever saw in Europe. Lom¬ bardy poplars form avenues along most of the country roads and surround many of the irrigated fields, in which wheat, lucerne, vines and beans grow with wonderful luxuriance, and which, when fallow, are smothered with gigantic thistles and other South European weeds. European oaks, peaches, figs and introduced conifers have so changed the aspect of the settled and cultivated parts of the country that one would suppose oneself to be in Italy rather than in South America. In the beautiful gardens and fruit plantations of Señor Salvador Isquierdo at Santa Inez, I saw
