"Yet it was from these very folk that were produced craftsmen of a really able type. It was they who, under the coaching of the missionaries, learned to become carpenters, to carve stone with professional cunning, and who became expert locksmiths, gunsmiths and workers in metals. There were many weavers and printers, and among them were a certain number who had actually attained to the expert art of watchmaking. Among the most astonishing walks of life, however, to which the Guaraní was transported was that of painter--in the artistic sense of the vocation. Hand in hand with this art went that of music. Indeed, one of the proofs of how thoroughly these matters were undertaken lies in the fact of the bringing over from Europe with a view to teaching the Guaranís music and singing, of Padre Juan Basco, who had previously been at the head of an archducal institution of music. "A school and a hospital were attached to each Reduction, and each of these, in addition, was provided with an asylum for the aged and infirm. Even here a certain amount of work was carried on, and the inmates of this institution were given such light tasks as they could perform."[39] * * * * * This colonization system was broken up by the _Mamelucos_, the greedy folk of San Paolo, who, having enslaved the Indians of that part of Brazil, cast envious eyes upon the peaceful labour of the missions, which they longed to impress in their own services. They therefore began a series of merciless onslaughts on the settlements, which, however, valiantly defended themselves for a time. But the Arcadia was doomed to fall, and the Jesuits were expelled from Paraguay in 1768, and little remains now but the ruin of their wonderful work, which Nature rapidly covered up with her generous robes of flower and foliage, as if desirous of hiding from view the brutalities of mankind in this one of her fairest provinces of South America. We shall now leave this fertile heart of the continent, to traverse with rapid strides a region of a very different nature: that of the "Far South"--a south, however, whose attributes of climate and general environment are not such as we generally associate with that point of the compass, and of which we have obtained a passing glimpse in our survey of the great Cordillera. In the southern-most part of the New World, the tapering portion of the South American continent, lies a vast region of which comparatively little is heard or known, yet one which in the future must take its place in the economic development of the globe. This is the Territory extending throughout the lower portion of Argentina, Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. It is a land lying far beyond the Tropics, in part a sort of Siberia of South America, terminating in those regions which Magellan described as "stark with eternal cold."