Many people in Brazil talk of the old coaching days in Petropolis, when stout mules toiled up the sharp gradients with their loads of passengers and freight. The team was changed in Petropolis and the route pursued on into Minas Geraes. This road is still in good condition—Petropolis the flower-decked and spotless is a centre of fine valley roads leading in seven different directions—and is a panorama of charming scenes. Like its sister mountain road in São Paulo and the “Graciosa” road from Curityba in Paraná, it has entered upon a new lease of life with the coming of the automobile. Will the entry of the cheap automobile develop road-making in Brazil as it has assisted in that good work in the United States? It is possible. Before the War, the chief importation of motor-cars was from Europe, the class was high grade, beautiful and extremely powerful. It is said that no city in the world can show more expensive high-power cars than Rio de Janeiro, where every hired machine is called upon to climb the steep grades of Tijuca or some neighbouring mountain. There are large numbers of such cars also to be seen in wealthy S. Paulo, but they do not go far from the Avenida Paulista for lack of good roads; the luxurious European car does its chief duty within city bounds. But with the introduction of the inexpensive car of North American build, the _fazendeiro_ is acquiring a car for country use. It seems certain that what may be called the agricultural use of such cars will help to bring about improvement in interior highways that was not necessarily called for when a trusty horse or mule could negotiate any kind of a boggy track. At the same time it is not to be expected that Brazil will soon be extensively traversed by great high roads such as France possesses or such as the Romans left in Britain. The climate of half the country opposes itself to road permanence with all the force of the tropics. Burned and disintegrated by fierce sun, deluged and beaten by even fiercer rains, choked by the lush growth of a soil so fertile that a tangled green maze springs up almost overnight in any cleared space, a road has poor chance of surviving in many parts of Brazil unless unceasing labour and unending money is spent upon it. In the very regions where roads are most wanted on account of lack of other transportation means, there is usually the least chance of money being raised for their upkeep. In thinking of possible Brazilian highways, it is necessary to eliminate from present consideration much of the great teeming forestal belt of the north, and the precipitous Serra regions of the south sea-border; the areas where automobile roads could be built with a chance of permanence without exhausting expenses in upkeep are the flat lands of the north, where some excellent plans and beginnings have been made in Bahia and Pernambuco; part of Minas, where the Triangulo already has a public automobile highway service, connecting