_Administration._--The colony is administered by a commissioner-general assisted by a privy council, including the secretary general and chief of the judicial service, the military, penitentiary and administrative departments. In 1879 an elective general council of sixteen members was constituted. There are a tribunal of first instance and a higher tribunal at Cayenne, besides four justices of peace, one of whom has extensive jurisdiction in other places. Of the L256,000 demanded for the colony in the colonial budget for 1906, L235,000 represented the estimated expenditure on the penal settlement, so that the cost of the colony was only about L21,000. The local budget for 1901 balanced at L99,000 and in 1905 at L116,450. Instruction is given in the college of Cayenne and in six primary schools. At the head of the clergy is an apostolic prefect. The armed force consists of two companies of marine infantry, half a battery of artillery, and a detachment of gendarmerie, and comprises about 380 men. The penal settlement was established by a decree of 1852. From that year until 1867, 18,000 exiles had been sent to Guiana, but for the next twenty years New Caledonia became the chief penal settlement in the French colonies. But in 1885-1887 French Guiana was appointed as a place of banishment for confirmed criminals and for convicts sentenced to more than eight years' hard labour. A large proportion of these men have been found unfit for employment upon public works. _History._--The Sieur La Revardiere, sent out in 1604 by Henry IV. to reconnoitre the country, brought back a favourable report; but the death of the king put a stop to the projects of formal colonization. In 1626 a small body of traders from Rouen settled on the Sinnamary, and in 1635 a similar band founded Cayenne. The Compagnie du Cap Nord, founded by the people of Rouen in 1643 and conducted by Poncet de Bretigny, the Compagnie de la France Equinoxiale, established in 1645, and the second Compagnie de la France Equinoxiale, or Compagnie des Douze Seigneurs, established in 1652, were failures, the result of incompetence, mismanagement and misfortune. From 1654 the Dutch held the colony for a few years. The French Compagnie des Indes Occidentales, chartered in 1664 with a monopoly of Guiana commerce for forty years, proved hardly more successful than its predecessors; but in 1674 the colony passed under the direct control of the crown, and the able administration of Colbert began to tell favourably on its progress, although in 1686 an unsuccessful expedition against the Dutch in Surinam set back the advance of the French colony until the close of the century.