The price has ranged during this period from two hundred and twenty-five reis per kilo paid for the short crop of 1904, down to one hundred and eight reis paid in 1906 when the crop was large; from that low point it climbed upwards, fluctuating about one hundred and sixty to one hundred and eighty reis from 1907 to 1913, fixed exchange making this price the equivalent of about three and a half to four cents a kilo, or something like a cent and a quarter to a cent and three-quarters per pound. In 1914, with war prices encouraging the sugar market, the price rose to two hundred and twelve reis a kilo, and in 1915 to two hundred and forty-four reis, a figure exceeded enormously in the post-war boom of 1919–20. The average yield of sugarcane per hectare in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo is fifty tons, or let us say something over twenty tons an acre; this does not compare with Caribbean coast yields, where eighty or ninety tons an acre is obtained from lands impregnated with volcanic ash, and fields are to be seen which have not been re-planted for a dozen years. Brazilian soils, chiefly composed of drifts of disintegrated granite, oxidized by the sun to a brilliant red tint, are sometimes very rich, but also are frequently just good honest soils that cannot stand abuse without exhaustion following; with proper rotation of crops these lands will yield generously, but it is scarcely surprising that, in regions where sugar has been almost continuously cultivated for a couple of centuries, the cane crop per acre is comparatively low. Pernambuco, for instance, counts her cane cultivation from the year 1534, when the first _engenho_ (sugar mill), piously named _Nossa Senhora de Ajuda_, was established near the settlement at Olinda. Brazilians are large consumers of sugar; the internal consumption has been calculated at three hundred thousand tons a year, or some eighty to ninety pounds a head of the population, and, with the exception of fine sweets imported, chiefly from France, all of the sugar used in Brazil is nationally produced. The sugar growing and refining industry is in an exceedingly healthy condition, is one of the important national resources, and has shown marked revival during the last two years. [Illustration: Carioca Cotton Mill, Rio de Janeiro. Catende Sugar Mill, Pernambuco. ] TOBACCO