The last strip of railway which serves the north Brazilian coast extends from Pará city (Belem), which is situated inside the mouth of the Amazon about one hundred and sixty miles from the sea, to the seacoast town Braganza, three hundred kilometers away. The country traversed produces Brazil nuts, tobacco, cotton and sugar, and free grants of land have been given beside the track to settlers. For the extreme north of Brazil the great fluvial network with the Amazon as the great main channel serves as the only means of communication: it will probably remain the sole highway for a long time to come. There is a total of over forty thousand miles of navigable waterways in the Amazon valley, with service by steamers and small _embarcações_ which suffice for the present needs of this immense but sparsely populated territory. The waterways of Brazil are of such extent and size that it is not possible as yet to foresee the time when they will be superseded either by rail or road. There are in the Brazilian interior several strips of railroad which serve no other purpose but that of supplementing riverine ways; the most spectacular and important of these is the renowned Madeira-Mamoré, one of the most costly railroads in the world and the imposer of the highest tariffs. Planned for the purpose of passing the dangerous falls blocking the Madeira-Mamoré river, outlet for rubber districts of Peru and Bolivia as well as of the Brazilian State of Matto Grosso, the line was completed in 1912 by the engineers of the Brazil Railways Company. Work was originally started more than forty years ago by the initiative of Colonel Church, two or three attempts ending in failure; when the last relay of American engineers took up the task in 1908 many relics were found of previous effort, one a locomotive imported by the Collins expedition of 1878: it was cleaned up and put into use. The line as completed has a length of two hundred and ninety-two kilometers; the chief enemy to construction was the deadly climate which took a terrible toll of lives both of engineers and labourers until sanitation measures similar to those enforced in Panama were taken.