American people. But let me stop, ladies and gentlemen, of speaking of my feeling that, in spite of my sincerity, I cannot express by words as they come from the bottom of my heart; the whole session would be too short for translating them and I must go back to the subject of my paper. In my report to the International Medical Congress I wrote also about the Cactus of Luther Burbank, of California, and incidentally I called the attention of the Brazilian Engineers to the recent process in which the English government is now interested, facilitating the atmospheric precipitations for small water supply near the coast, causing the deposit of dew as has been practiced in Gibraltar. I have read something about this process on an interesting paper of Mr. George Hurbard read this year on March 3rd, before the Royal Society of Arts, London: I wrote too about the forests considering them like I am about to do. The importance of forests as protectors of mankind is an incontrovertible fact, and there is no spirit, less observing as it may be, that has not noticed, even slightly, some influence of the trees in benefitting life. At different times I have treated this important subject that impressed me so much, in the national and foreign press and in public addresses here in America, several times discussing the influence of the trees upon our life. Once speaking about the combined work of medicine and engineering in the noble and humanitarian campaign to improve the means of life on the surface of this planet, especially to preserve and increase the vigor of the people, I said in part: “Life progressively is becoming very difficult to be preserved in good conditions because of the incessant exhaustion of elements that are favorable to it on the surface of the earth, where a continuous transformation is observed all over. “The forests, the best protectors of our life, are going fast, and from the modification that their disappearance is bringing to the climate and to the natural conditions all over the earth, will come serious troubles to the solution of the sanitary problems in the future. “It is necessary to use intelligently so important elements of life, without so barbarous destructions, because so far as the present scientific knowledge is concerned, there is no doubt, at all, that from the lack of the forest will come the greatest modifications in the meteorological conditions of the earth, and you know, the meteorological conditions――the weather――has the most positive influence on our life. This influence does not appear only on the health conditions, but, too, in the most complicate social phenomena.