“Extensive propaganda in favor of cotton growing is being animated by the far-seeing and incomparable activity of Dr. Miguel Calmon. If this work is continued in all parts of the country where cotton is cultivated there is no doubt of success. The cotton production of Brazil will find itself doubled if not quadrupled in a short time, and this country will take the high place in world markets which is legitimately hers as the greatest exporter of high-class cotton.” Both Federal and State Governments have brought technical experts from foreign countries to help in the solution of Brazilian problems; the Directorship of the Jardim Botanico in Rio, where a series of valuable experiments in tropical agriculture were carried out, was for some time in the hands of an English expert, Dr. John Willis, who brought his knowledge of Ceylon and Malaysia to bear upon Brazilian conditions; the work of the eminent Swiss, Dr. Emil Goeldi, on the Amazon, succeeded by the labours of Dr. Jacques Huber, have been invaluable in regard to classification of North Brazilian natural plants and their adaptation to commercial uses, as well as the introduction of suitable tropical fruits, etc., from other regions. The Ministry of Agriculture in Rio is the centre of much live work, and has had a series of excellent men at its head. The brilliant Pedro de Toledo was neither the first nor the last of agricultural devotees in this post. The work of State Societies of Agriculture is more highly specialized, and cotton has its list of societies just as coffee, cacao, sugar and tobacco have theirs. Many big cotton estate owners take a keen interest in improving conditions of production, and have been during the last few years definitely helped by the American expert already referred to and by a Texan cotton grower at the head of demonstration farms operated by the Leopoldina Railway Company. One meets in Brazil an unusually high percentage of finely educated men who are _fazendeiros_, who willingly leave the gay cities of the coast to live in patriarchal authority upon interior farms having as their sole connection with the outside world a narrow mule-track; they appear to have inherited the affection for land of their own possession which sent the early Portuguese so far afield, and which seldom seems to be mingled with any dislike of solitude. It is this feeling which scantily populates the sertão with fazendas, far removed from any town, dotting the vast interior with _nucleos_ of independent life; it may be partly due to a strain of Indian ancestry, for it extends to the upper reaches of the Amazon and its tributaries, lining, at infrequent intervals, the banks of forest-bound rivers with palm-thatch huts, their foundations in the water, where families subsist upon a handful of farinha, and fish caught in the flood below them, looking with unenvious eyes at the passing boats of rubber collectors and apparently quite content with their withdrawal from the world. To