Today the mining industry of Brazil accounts for a very small item on her exports lists, chiefly because the diamonds which go out are mostly contraband, the gold is produced by only two principal mines, and while there is a promising export of manganese it is insignificant compared to the big business of the country or to the possibilities contained in Brazil’s mineral seamed mountains. In the early eighteenth century Brazil was a famous gold country, and it is reckoned that over five hundred million dollars’ worth of this metal has been taken out. Nearly all this gold was found in placers easily washed out by hand in the crudest manner; when the rich alluvial deposits along river valleys were exhausted Brazil ceased to be a gold producer on a spectacular scale. In Minas Geraes rich sands were found near the present Ouro Preto, the first mining city that was founded bearing the name of Villa Rica; all about it the whole country is still in heaps, turned over by the miners who came a couple of hundred years ago. In that day people flocked into Minas, coming by road from S. Paulo, by the S. Francisco river from Bahia, and by a shorter cut over the mountain passes from Rio. The bones of many folk remained by the way: it is said that of one band of 300 Paulistas setting out in 1725 only five persons, two white men and three negroes, reached their objective, the far interior mines of Cuyabá. It became necessary for the authorities to forbid the taking of negroes to the mines, so general was the abandonment of plantations, but the protest of the Crown was only half-hearted; it was eminently satisfactory that a stream of gold and diamonds should flow across the Atlantic to Lisbon, and it was of as little use for governors to point out the bad economy of coastal depopulation in the seventeen hundreds as it had been for Governor Diogo de Menezes to write to the King in 1608: “_Your Majesty may believe me that the true mines of Brazil are sugar and brazil-wood, whence your Majesty draws so much advantage without costing the Royal Treasury a single penny_.” [Illustration: _Two Views of São Paulo City._ São Paulo, premier city of the leader State of the Brazilian Union, stands on the breezy uplands of the southern plateau; it is a busy, prosperous centre with the first modern civic equipment. Population 550,000. ] Quarrels at the mines led to the “Guerra dos Emboabas,” a factional disturbance between the Paulista discoverers and stranger gold-diggers; in the end the Paulistas were driven back, retired to their own uplands, and Minas Geraes was politically separated. Indomitably energetic, the men of S. Paulo turned their attention southward, where the Spaniards had entered and settled, drove the intruders out of Rio Grande do Sul and thus secured another, and one of the finest, regions for Brazil.