To record every Indian town which has been overturned in Paraguay, and the causes and periods of the fall of each, were a task of infinite time and labour. It appears on record that upwards of four hundred towns, which formerly stood around Guadalcazar, a city of Tucuman now destroyed, utterly perished. Within the limits of the cities Cordoba, Rioja, St. Iago, St. Miguel of Tucuman, Corrientes, and Asumpcion, I might almost say that innumerable colonies have fallen to the ground. Those which remain are mere shadows of towns, consisting of a few miserable inhabitants—miserable, for they are slaves to Spanish individuals. Before I relate the devastation of many of our Guarany towns by the Mamalukes, inhabitants of Brazil, allow me to make a few premises. The soldiers, fresh arriving from Spain, subdued the lands and nations bordering on the Parana and Paraguay only: as for those more remote, they did not want courage to explore them, but means. Not a few of the Guaranies were enlightened by the torch of the Gospel, chiefly by the Franciscan Fathers, and, if circumstances permitted, placed in colonies. St. Francisco Solano and Lewis Bolaños were famous for their apostolic expeditions in that age; but the want of associates like themselves, and of successors, rendered them unequal to the harvest which lay before them; and infinite was the number of Guaranies which lurked within the coverts of the woods and shores—a multitude hostile, on every opportunity, to the Spaniards, then few in number. In 1610, Ferdinand Arias, the governor both of Buenos-Ayres and Asumpcion, marched out with numerous forces against the Guaranies inhabiting the banks of the Uruguay, but alarmed by their numbers and ferocity, returned to the city. Not by the fire-vomiting arms of soldiers, but by the sweet eloquence of the Fathers, by love, not by fear, were the Guaranies vanquished. In the same year, Father Marcello Lorenzana, a Spaniard, and master of our college at Asumpcion, at length prevailed upon the Guaranies who wandered between the Paraguay and Parana, to embrace the Roman Catholic religion, in the large town which he had built for them, under the illustrious name of St. Ignatius Loyola. Near about the same time, Fathers Giuseppe Cataldino and Simone Mazzeta, Italians, Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, an American Spaniard, and their successors, in after years, Roque Gonzalez, a Spaniard of Paraguay, Pedro Romero, Diego Boroa, &c., all Jesuits, explored the province of Guayra, as also those forest and mountain coverts toward the river Uruguay, which had proved inaccessible to the Spanish soldiery, where they discovered many thousands of Guaranies, who were assembled in colonies, and brought over to God and the Catholic King.