In 1874, and for some years afterwards, Amazonian rubber prices ranged between fifty-two and seventy-five cents (U. S. currency) a pound; between 1879 and 1880 there was a quick climb, due to the bull operations of a Brazilian syndicate which bought and held rubber. It was temporarily successful, prices during the last year of the ring’s existence touching one dollar and twenty cents and never falling below ninety-five cents, but in 1884 the bottom fell out, and rubber took a hasty dive to forty-eight cents—recovering, however, in the course of the next year, in response to demand for rubber tyres, to ninety-eight cents. For the next ten years rubber fluctuated about sixty, seventy and eighty cents, with new industrial uses developing in Europe and North America and demand always keeping pace with supply; by this time the total yield offered to the markets was about fifty thousand tons yearly, the Amazon supplying half and the rest coming from West Africa, Mexico and Central America. In 1896 the price rose, ranging between ninety cents and one dollar and twelve cents, and the Amazon boomed again as it had done twelve years before; Manáos, the terminus of ocean transportation and the central collecting point for the rubber of the upper rivers, bedecked herself in these rosy days. Five years later the failure of the American Crude Rubber Company, a distributing firm domiciled in New York, threw large stocks of the goma upon unready markets, and the price slumped. Rubber merchants upon the Amazon would have suffered more than they actually did had not the factor of exchange come to their aid; between 1899 and 1906 the value of the milreis oscillated all the way from sixpence to fifteenpence, and while to some Brazilian operations a low rate of exchange meant embarrassment if not ruin, it spelt salvation to the dealer in raw products. In 1906 exchange was fixed by the establishment of the Conversion Office in Rio, but by this time rubber was fetching such good prices that the Amazon was again basking in prosperity. The prices paid for Amazonian rubber during the period from 1903 to 1915 show the rise of the third great crest of rubber waves to the dazzling height of 1910, when the merchants who would have sold at seventy-five cents and made a profit found themselves with a dollar and a half, two dollars, two and a half and then three, without knowing why; money came like dew from heaven. In many instances it also melted as readily: