To-day we are not going to cut estradas. We have come to a part of the forest which is already looped with several such paths, and we are now standing outside the hut where live the seringueiros who work them. The time is about five in the morning, but, early as it is, the labourers are getting ready for the business of the day; they are now collecting their tools, and hurriedly swallowing the coffee they put to boil whilst they were slipping into their few clothes. We are joined by the seringueiro who is going to take us with him on his round. He is wearing a battered felt wideawake, a cotton shirt open at the neck, and an old pair of trousers that are tied round his ankles with string; his feet are bare. He carries a small axe, called a “machadinha”, and a big collection of small tin cups. When he gets to the first rubber-tree on his beat, he deals it several blows with his axe, making a girdle of cuts at a height which is conveniently within his reach. This operation is known as “tapping,” or “bleeding.” Sap immediately begins to trickle from the wounds he has made in the tree, so under each cut he has to hang one of his collecting-cups. These are fastened to the tree by means of a bit of tin on the rim, which he bends over into the bark. Some seringueiros use clay cups, which they affix to the trees with a dab of moist clay. Evidently this tree we are standing by has often been operated upon, for it has a wide belt of scars. Some of them look as if they were the marks of very severe wounds; the gashes have healed under a new skin of bark, but in such a way that the surrounding surface of the trunk is very uneven with furrows and swellings. This disfigured appearance is a sign that the tree has been roughly treated by previous rubber-gatherers. However, if it had been as badly used by the early generations of seringueiros as were some of the Heveas, it would not now be here to tell us any tales about the reckless way in which tapping used to be done in Brazil and neighbouring countries. So little did the rubber-gatherers of the past care about the future welfare of the rubber industry of the Amazon that they often used to fell the valuable Heveas and hack them to pieces, sacrificing the source of a continuous milk-supply to their greed for getting as much rubber as possible at the moment, and with as little trouble as possible. Some time ago masters began to see that they could not afford to let their men be so wasteful; if the Hevea-trees were destroyed in the more accessible parts of the forest, which had only been opened up at much expense and under great difficulties, the hunting-grounds would have to be extended farther inland, at far greater expense and under much greater difficulties. Nowadays, owing to the growing popularity of Plantation Rubber, there is a strong feeling that tapping methods should be further improved. Brazil and the neighbouring rubber countries have wakened up to the necessity not only of safeguarding