So far, I have shown you there is little doubt that the aborigines of Brazil discovered the rubber in their own country; and I think I have given you sufficient evidence for asking you to believe that the discovery was made off their own bat, and at quite as early a period as the natives of Haïti and of Mexico separately and independently discovered the rubber-trees in their own homelands. I will now give you some further proofs that there is more truth than fiction in the story I told you. Come with me into the Brazilian forests this very day. The scenery, you find, is so wildly beautiful that words cannot possibly do it justice, much less exaggerate its delights; in spite of the coming of the European, and the annual invasion by hundreds of rubber-gatherers, few changes have been made in the name of Progress within these forests; so in the days before the white man knew of their existence they must have looked very much the same as they do now. And the pure-bred Brazilian native has not been entirely wiped off the face of his homeland. You may still come across some of the aborigines, and they still scorn clothes, adorn themselves with feathers and beads, carry a blowpipe, hunt their meat, and trap their fish. As we start off along a track that has little or no more claim to be called a path than had the Indian trail in my story, I point out to you a specimen of the rubber-yielding tree that is a native of these forests. Very soon you notice for yourselves that there are numbers of these trees in the district. Were you a son of these wilds, wholly dependent on your surroundings for anything and everything in the way of supplies, would you not try to find out whether this tree cannot be made to provide you with something to eat or drink or play with? Take out your penknife, and cut into the bark of one of these trees. Out oozes a thickish white substance, some of which drops on to your fingers. Without a moment’s thought or hesitation, it comes natural to you to rub thumb against sticky fingers, whereupon the substance gradually solidifies, and at last breaks loose in the form of a tiny pellet. In a similarly simple way the mere savage discovered rubber hundreds of years ago; only he used a flint axehead, or maybe a sharp tooth of some animal, instead of a penknife. With regard to the method of collecting rubber by scraping a hole in the earth, and leaving the sap which trickled down into it to be dried by the natural heat of the earth and the air, I can only assure you that the white man found the aborigines “making” raw rubber in this way, so they must have invented the plan themselves. To defend my choice of Brazil as the scene of my story, I must now justify my statement that the discovery of rubber in this country has been of more importance than similar discoveries in the forests of other lands.