We shall leave for a special chapter the explanation of the means recently adopted for bettering the condition of the seringueiros, augmenting their productive capacity and recompensing them more justly for their work. TRANSPORTS AND FREIGHTS The problem of transports and freight continues to be one of the most palpitating questions in Brazil, notwithstanding the great progress in this particular made during the last 10 years. The considerable increase in the mercantile marine and the incessant construction of the numerous railroads of penetration, have not been able to keep pace with the extraordinary development of the country and its notable economic expansion, the national commerce continuing to feel the want of further means of transport and to suffer from the very high rates of freights. In Amazonia, the difficulty of communication has become still more felt because of the vast region and territories embraced in this great State, sparingly peopled and whose centres of production are located so far distant from the exporting markets of Manáos and Belém de Pará. Watered in every direction by innumerable great rivers, tributaries of the great river—the Amazon—the greatest in the world, the Amazonic region still remains to a very great part unexplored, inestimable riches susceptible of being extracted, lying unutilized, in virtue of the deficiency in navigation; in fact, if the principal rivers are navigated regularly to some extent, even though sparingly, others leading to immensely rich regions are very rarely navigated by either ship or boats, which might assure the transport of the products gathered. Many and divers are the circumstances which concur towards bringing about this state of affairs, but the most important in resumé is that of the want of capital for the construction of ships and the establishment of regular lines of fluvial navigation as also the obstacles offered either by the irregular courses of some rivers obstructed by waterfalls, shoots and rapids, or simply obstructed by the trunks of trees and other materials or by the diminutive volume of water during the dry seasons which makes impossible navigation of even ordinary draught. One of the most interesting phases of the Amazonian problem is, however, in the regulating and increasing of the navigation of the rivers, with the object of assuring ample transport facilities and the approximation to the centres of production with the consuming markets. The opening up of the ways of fluvial communication is an essential condition to the progress of the Amazonic region, by the lesser expenditure required by transport upon water in comparison with land transportation which in those regions would be particularly difficult and costly.