The huge coffee industry in Brazil will not receive a great deal of space in this book for two reasons: the first is that the subject needs a special monograph to deal with it thoroughly, and there is an entire literature on the subject, especially excellent in French, Portuguese and Italian; the second reason is that coffee culture and marketing is so highly organized that there is little room for outside enterprise. Existing plantations are probably quite capable of taking care of what new planting may be required—and this likely to be in the immediate future: the drastic checks given to planting by the authorities after the terrible fright of the great over-production of 1906, that led to the much-discussed Valorization, have done their work so thoroughly that at the present, with the elimination of many thousands of trees owing to exhaustion, there is room for extended planting on São Paulo and Minas fazendas. Brazilians, to whom life on a fazenda is always pleasant, are large owners of coffee-producing lands, and are quite aware of economic conditions, as well as being experienced growers and exporters of coffee. I do not, therefore, advise any tyro to enter upon the business of a coffee fazenda; such plantations offer good opportunities for investment, but apart from that angle do not call for outside activity. There are many foreigners in the coffee-producing business in Brazil, of course. Italians, besides supplying a very large percentage of the labour on the S. Paulo estates, are considerable owners of plantations; the Dumont Estates, English owned and operated, are world famous; and the greatest single owner of coffee trees in the world, possessor of thirteen million shrubs, is Francisco Schmidt, who began life in Brazil as a poor German immigrant. The first coffee plants brought to Brazil were of the _liberica_ variety and were planted in Pará at sea-level, a situation to which this kind is not averse. This was in 1727 and when in 1761 the Mother Country remitted taxes on coffee from her American possessions, cultivation was encouraged and spread south to Maranhão, Ceará, Espirito Santo, Minas and Rio, eventually reaching the red diabasic soils of São Paulo. The variety grown here is chiefly _café arabica_, preferring an upland habitat, but in the course of years Brazil has developed hardy hybrid varieties of her own. A couple of sacks of coffee are said to have been sent out from the south early in the nineteenth century, but real business did not develop until after Dom João arrived and promulgated laws freeing Brazilian trade from its swaddling clothes. Between 1835 and 1840 export began in large quantities, the latter year recording 1,383,000 sacks sent abroad for sale; slave labour was used, and the interior was searched for the deepest blood-red lands, found in their richest belts in São Paulo State.