The entire series of processes of Amazon rubber production, from the day when the _matteiro_ clears a path in the forest from rubber tree to rubber tree, until the shipper boxes the split halves of the _pelles_ in the _armazem_ in Manáos or Pará, is in remarkable contrast not only to plantation methods, but to the system under which that other great Brazilian export staple, coffee, is prepared for market. It is the contrast between an industry that has evolved itself from methods first discovered by Indians of the forest interior, and another whose processes are mapped out on a preconceived plan. To this day the rubber dealers on the Amazon will tell you that they do not know the cost of production of a kilo of rubber; all that they or the collectors know with certainty is that it must necessarily cost less than the price at which the rubber is marketed—a smaller amount must be paid, and adjustment has to be made in the _seringal_, not in New York or London; with the inflated prices paid for every simplest necessity of life upon the Amazon, nearly all imported because the craze for rubber-collecting some years ago led to the abandonment of even such prolific crops as beans and mandioca, a time of stress falls most severely upon the people who are least able to bear it. Remedies for the ills of the Brazilian rubber industry have been suggested and demanded for many a year by the more far-seeing Brazilians; there is perhaps no better presentment of the subject than the _paracer_ read to the Brazilian Congress in December, 1913, by Eloy de Souza, afterwards published in Rio under the title _A Crise da Borracha_ (The Rubber Crisis); he speaks of the condition of “economic paradox” by which Amazonas “gave millions upon millions of gold without any part of this being used for the prosperity of the immense region where so much wealth was produced” and tells that when plantation rubber was looming in competition with the Brazilian product the authorities were entreated to arm themselves against the danger, but “the echo of these voices was lost in the wide desert of national indifference.” When the truth could be no longer avoided steps were at last taken, with nothing but the waste of enormous sums in the tragi-comedy of the “Defesa da Borracha” as the result: its failure was no fault of the men who constantly spoke out about conditions, such as Miguel Calmon, the Deputy, the journalist Alcindo Guanabara, Dr. Passos de Miranda, and the “genial and devoted Apostle of the Amazon,” Euclydes da Cunha. Almost all of the people engaged or interested in the rubber business of the Amazon are agreed upon certain measures which should be taken to put it upon a sounder footing; they are, briefly:— 1. Increased production of cleaner rubber, whether obtained from Amazonian plantations or by opening out new forestal wild regions.