Ronaldo de Carvalho[8] considers Romero’s reply somewhat timid, inasmuch as he accepts, erroneously, many of Buckle’s conclusions. Buckle’s passage “is not, as it appeared to the illustrious Brazilian writer, ‘true in a general sense.’ Yet it should ‘be meditated upon by all Brazilians’, that they may see what a dangerous snare it is to rely so much, in our inveterate fondness for things foreign, upon the notions imported from the intellectual markets on the other side of the Atlantic.… Buckle’s error consisted in considering the evolution of peoples solely under the influence of physical and geographical factors; more enduring than these are the ethnico-historical factors, which are much more important and far more powerful than the first.” De Carvalho adds little to Romero’s refutation, which, in substance, he repeats. At the time that Buckle’s first volume was originally published (1857), Brazilian literature had long entered upon an autonomous career and was in the throes of Romanticism, which in Brazil was an era of intense and highly fruitful production. He can hardly be blamed for his ignorance on this score, when an authority like Ferdinand Wolf, writing his _Le Brésil Litteraire_ some six years later, is accused by the querulous Romero of setting down many laughable exaggerations. II Three ethnic strains have combined to produce the Brazilian of today: (1) the Portuguese, (2) the native Indian, (3) the African Negro, who was brought in as a slave by the Portuguese. The native element, known as the Brazilian-Guarany, at the time of the discovery knew no metals; they possessed a rudimentary knowledge of weaving, and some of them practised ceramics; their instruments were of polished stone, and their fishing and hunting implements were of the most primitive. The form of organization was rough. “Some spoke a rich language of delicate accents and varied expression; they had traditional customs and were skilful in the arts of war and peace; others, however, were coarse, deficient in culture, roaming in nomadic bands along the coast or amidst the high sertões. Some respected certain rules of morality and religion, in which, for example, the family ties were sacred.…”[9] Others dwelt in a certain “embryonic socialism” which permitted free love and the participation of woman in masculine pursuits. Ethnologists are not agreed upon the religious status of the tribes, hovering between the hypotheses of polytheism and anthropomorphic animism; the latter is more likely. The Portuguese came at the height of their national glory. The sixteenth century, famed among them for its physical prowess, is also the epoch of Camões, Sá de Miranda, Bernardim Ribeiro and Gil Vicente. As to the Negro, his history in Brazil is much the same as that of the black slave in the United States, except that, owing to the proportions of interbreeding, the “color line” is less tightly drawn in the southern republic.