There are other abuses which also take place in the classifying of the rubber, which gives as a result that the buyers prefer to do business upon inferior qualities, because these offer a larger margin for profits. The rubber is exported in American pineboxes which can hold nearly 150 Kilos. The dearness of manual labor in the Amazon territory makes it difficult to take advantage of the innumerable species of timber-woods in which the valley of the great river is so abundantly rich. * * * * * In the remaining markets of the country where the rubber is negotiated, the price is regulated by the quotations in Pará. These local markets are of little importance and in nothing do they distinguish themselves as to the relative transactions in rubber, from the general mass of business. The class of =aviadores= or merchant-trader does not exist. Each producer sends his stock to his agent or representative or sells it to the first buyer. The rubber is collected from either maniçoba or mangabeira. In the commerce of those products, the markets of Bahia and Fortaleza stand out the most prominently, to which places a certain appreciable portion of cultivated plantation rubber converges every year besides a great quantity of native rubber. ECONOMIC AND FINANCIAL IMPORTANCE—FEDERAL AND STATE REVENUE—EXPORTATION TAX The most superficial examination of the actual economic position of Brazil demonstrates at once and in an incisive manner how important the rubber industry is to the national life of the country. Possessor of the innumerable riches distributed by the three Kingdoms of Nature, it is almost exclusively due to the cultivation of coffee and to the extraction of rubber that Brazil owes its extraordinary commercial development in these last twenty years. The great fortunes which the plantations of the famous red-bean of the coffee-tree created in the South and the considerable profits which the exploitation of the precious gum have produced in the North, were certainly the causes which most influenced the development of the production to such an extraordinary degree, relegating to a much lower schedule in the general tabular statement of Brazilian exportation, all the products, whose commerce although certainly remunerative, does not show such certain and speedy results. The general exportation of Brazilian merchandise was £63,724,440 in 1909, £63,091,547 in 1910 and £66,838,982 in 1911. To these totals, coffee and rubber contributed during each of the same three years £52,401,276, £51,342,278 and £55,458,221 respectively—totals these, sufficient by themselves, to guarantee with advantage the Brazilian international commercial equilibrium, when it is seen that in those said same years, the general importation of merchandise amounted to £37,139,354, £47,871,974 and £52,798,016.