Preponderant as are the numbers of Italians, they are by no means the only southern settlers of the last fifty years; Poles and Russians came in notable quantities in the late 1870’s and early 1880’s, settling in the Paraná uplands as well as in _nucleos_ in São Paulo. At the end of the century there were two thousand Russo-Germans from the Volga, farming land on methods of their own in the neighbourhood of Curityba; an obstinate folk, they insisted upon tilling prairies like their own steppes instead of choosing forestal land, shared all goods on the Russian communistic plan, and gave the Brazilian authorities so much trouble that there must have been sighs of relief when bodies of them deserted the _nucleos_ and demanded to be sent back to Russia. From those who stayed has grown up the tribe of Russian carters who do the road-transportation work of the high Paraná plateau; there are groups of farmers, too, both Russians and Poles, who share land in common and are raisers of wheat, their favourite rye, and other cereals; some have taken up the business of gathering and curing _matte_, the “tea” which South Brazil grows and exports to the Argentine. There is one specially thriving Russian settlement to be seen in São Paulo state, at Nova Odessa; the wooden buildings are Russian in type, the tall churches are like pictures from a traveller’s Russian notebook, and the institution of the samovar and the huge family stove is clung to. These people are great lovers of land, and its possession has contented them; as yet there is little mingling with the social or political life of Brazil.