In his _Historia da Litteratura Brasileira_,[7] Romero devotes his third chapter to setting Buckle right. Brazil, he declares, far from suffering excessive rainfall, is subject to calamitous and destructive droughts. The Englishman, who never visited Brazil, errs likewise in his conception of the country’s natural wonders, which he exaggerates in the traditional fashion that was handed down by the earliest comers. Despite the presence of the Amazon, the rivers in general are small, not the largest in the world; the mountains, similarly, far from rearing their crests into unattainable cloudy heights, are of the fourth and fifth order when compared with their fellows of the old world or the new. Neither are the animals in Brazil more gigantic and ferocious than elsewhere. “Our fauna,” writes Romero, “is neither the richest nor the most terrible in the world. We haven’t the elephant, the camel, the hippopotamus, the lion, the tiger, the rhinoceros, the zebra, the giraffe, the buffalo, the gorilla, the chimpanzee, the condor and the eagle.” Buckle speaks of Brazil’s unrivalled fertility as an impediment; the truth is that her fertility is not unrivalled, nor is it an impediment. In conclusion, “Buckle is right in the picture he draws of our backwardness, but wrong in the determination of its causes.” According to Romero, three chief reasons are to be adduced; these are (1) natural, (2) ethnic and (3) moral. To the first belongs the excessive heat, in conjunction with the droughts in the major part of the country, as well as the malignant fevers prevalent on the coast. Chief among the second is the “relative incapacity” of the three races that comprise the population. To the last belong the “historic factors called politics, legislation, habits, customs, which are effects that afterward act as causes.”