Valley of the Amazon is as simple as its physical
geography. There is no circle of the seasons as with us--nature moves in
a straight line. The daily order of the weather is uniform for months.
There is very little difference between the dry and hot seasons; the
former, lasting from July to December, is varied with showers, and the
latter, from January to June, with sunny days, while the daily
temperature is the same within two or three degrees throughout the year.
On the water-shed between the Orinoco and Negro it rains throughout the
year, but most water falls between May and November, the coolest season
in that region. On the Middle Negro the wet season extends from June 1st
to December 1st, and is the most sultry time.

Comparatively few insects, birds, or beasts are to be seen in summer;
but it is the harvest-time of the inhabitants, who spend the glorious
weather rambling over the plaias and beaches, fishing and
turtle-hunting. The middle of September is the midsummer of the valley.
The rainy season, or winter, is ushered in by violent thunder-storms
from the west. It is then that the woods are eloquent with buzzing
insects, shrill cicadas, screaming parrots, chattering monkeys, and
roaring jaguars. The greatest activity of animal and vegetable life is
in June and July. The heaviest rains fall in April, May, and June.
Scarcely ever is there a continuous rain for twenty-four hours.
Castelnau witnessed at Pebas a fall of not less than thirty inches in a
single storm. The greatest amount noticed in New York during the whole
month of September was 12.2 inches. The humidity of the atmosphere, as
likewise the luxuriance of vegetation and the abundance and beauty of
animal forms, increases from the Atlantic to the Andes. At the foot of
the Andes, Poeppig found that the most refined sugar in a few days
dissolved into sirup, and the best gunpowder became liquid even when
inclosed in canisters. So we found the Napo steaming with vapor. Fogs,
however, are rarely seen on the Amazon.

The animals and plants are not all simultaneously affected by the change
of seasons. The trees retain their verdure through the dry _vera[=o]_,
and have no set time for renewing their foliage. There are a few trees,
like Mongruba, which drop their leaves at particular seasons; but they
are so few in number they create the impression of a few dead leaves in
a thick-growing forest. Leaves are falling and flowers drooping all the
year round. Each