After travelling up the Amazon as far as from Boston to Chicago the Rio Negro is reached. The name means the black river. As one writer says, “the Rio Negro is as black as one’s hat and the Amazon is as yellow as pea soup.” It is a very wide river at its mouth, and the steamer turns up into its black waters. Just ahead may be seen a haze of white buildings with their red tile roofs. Here, in the midst of this vast wilderness, where the forest stretches out for hundreds of miles in each direction, and where a monkey could travel for days by jumping from branch to branch, is located a live, hustling town with fine public buildings, electric lights, electric tram lines and a theatre that would be a credit to any town. The ridges of the roofs are sometimes so covered with turkey-buzzards as almost to make one think at first sight that they are artificial ornaments. They used to be the chief sanitary force, but the new waterworks and sewer system have greatly relieved their labours. Like Pará, this city smells of rubber and the day dreams of the inhabitants are permeated with that one idea. Above the junction with the Rio Negro the Amazon is called the Solimoes, for a thousand miles, and beyond that it is known as the Marañon. At Iquitos, in Peru, this river is a mile wide. The area of the basin of this river is three times that of the Mississippi. The Tocantins, Xingu, Tapajos, Purus, Negro, Jurua, and Madeira, all noble streams in themselves, pour their floods into this one channel. The last named river leads to the famous Acre territory, which has proven a bonanza for Brazil. She paid Bolivia $9,600,000 in 1904, and in the next five years it paid back nearly $24,000,000 in export duties on rubber alone. The great traveller of a century ago, Baron von Humboldt, declared that “The valley of the Amazon in the near future is bound to become a great centre of civilization and the world’s greatest storehouse.” This prediction has not proven true, for more than a century has passed since the statement was made and little development has been made. The natural resources are there, just as Humboldt saw them, however, and still await the efforts of man to turn them to good account. Right at the mouth of the Amazon lies the great state of Pará, as large as two states the size of Texas, with only half a million inhabitants, less than one person to each square mile of territory, scattered over its confines. It has a fertile soil capable of producing almost anything necessary for the support and comfort of life; it possesses tablelands at an elevation high enough to escape the moisture of the river and continued heat of a tropical sun; in the mouth of the Amazon is an island almost as large as Portugal, which is capable of supplying thousands of head of cattle for the world’s food supply.