Bryophytes mattered to mid-nineteenth century botanists primarily because of their role as primeval beings, plants that predated almost all other vegetative life amidst a growing scientific fever for evolutionary studies. Spruce’s most popular, oft-quoted journal entry described his realization of the “idea of a primeval forest” upon reaching Brazil, a rich depiction of “enormous trees” that were “decked with fantastic parasites, and hung over with lianas, which varied in thickness from slender threads to python-like masses … now round, now flattened, now knotted, and now twisted with the regularity of a cable”. Writing to the director of Kew, William Jackson Hooker, from Ambato in 1858, Spruce appealed to this sense of evolutionary interest while sending back a beautifully complete set of moss specimens. Although he had suffered a period of particularly bad health while travelling through a damp and cold region, the botanist came across a scene rich in bryophytes, delighting him to no end. After listing all of the mosses and hepatics that could be found growing in “shady rivulets”, Spruce wrote that “I had never seen anything which so astonished me”. Taken by the botanical riches, he went on that “I could almost fancy myself in some primeval forest of Calamites, and if some giant Saurian had appeared, crushing its way among the succulent stems, my surprise could hardly have been increased”. The mosses and hepatics that he collected in this “primeval” area brought him a large sum of money, one of the most valuable collections of his fifteen-year expedition.