The leaves are gathered for three or four months in the year, May or June until August; carried to a central hearth, they are dried over fires, packed in bags and sent on mule-back to Ponta Grossa or Curityba, and there carefully prepared for export. Mills and sieves of Brazilian invention reduce the dried leaves to powder, divide it into qualities according to the fineness of the reduction, and pack for export; Paranaguá is _the_ matte port. Thousands of colonists and isolated dwellers of interior Paraná depend upon matte for the basis of their living; the _hervaes_ (matte forests) are often seen together with the fantastic Paraná pine, a thick green growth below the tall stems of this other tree characteristic of the landscape of southern Brazil. The Paraná pine, besides its value as a yielder of excellent lumber, is noted for its product of pine kernels so large that they often exceed good-sized chestnuts in bulk. They are to be seen in huge sacks on sale in all the markets of South Brazil, are boiled like chestnuts and form a nutritious and excellent food. They should be better known, but their use seems to be largely confined to the Italian population, who have always had a predilection for pine kernels: when the Romans invaded Britain they brought and planted pine trees of the nut-yielding variety. Each matte _herval_ is invaded in the picking season by local gatherers; the central fire is started, the trees stripped of small branches; care is taken to prune them so that succeeding yields are not injured; there is not a great variety of shrubs in the vicinity of the matte forests, and not much cleaning has to be done. Brought down to the ports, the cost of prepared matte rarely exceeds six cents: including freight and other costs it could be placed upon North American markets as it is in European, at about eighteen to twenty cents a pound in normal times. During the year 1915 Brazil exported her highest record of matte to date, 75,800 tons, but left this figure far behind in 1919 and 1920, with over 90,000 tons. This was not such a good price as that of 1913, when sixty-five thousand tons fetched 21,000 contos, at an average price of five hundred and forty-two reis per kilo. The amount exported has gone up steadily since the beginning of the century, when thirty-five to forty thousand tons was a fair total.