another island at long intervals, and so remaining almost undisturbed in their habits from year to year. The advent of these old friends is looked upon as an augury of bright import by the Peruvian people, in view of the period of great trial and disaster that followed the decline of the guano trade in years past. It is certain that the revival of the industry will find Peru better able to profit by its blessings than formerly, when the possession of an apparently inexhaustible treasure led to reckless expenditure and resulted in the financial difficulties that an unlimited credit, continually drawn upon, invariably produces. In Alejandro Garland’s recent book on Peru, an interesting history of the guano trade is given, which places particular emphasis on the evils that developed out of its phenomenal growth and peculiar conditions. [Illustration: THE PELICAN AT HOME.] In 1840, when the sale of guano first began to figure in the government receipts, the total revenues of the country did not exceed three million dollars. Ten years later, the government revenue from guano alone was more than five million dollars. The demand for the product increased in all parts of the world, and the annual exports rose to two hundred thousand tons. This rapid increase in the guano trade was largely due to the activity of the consignees, in whose hands the government placed it for sale, and their influence in the financial affairs of the country became very great. Every financial difficulty that arose at that time was met by mortgaging the future returns from the sale of guano; and Peru, counting on the extraordinary and abundant revenue from this source met all the demands of the government without recourse to taxation,—a condition unheard-of elsewhere in the financial history of the world. [Illustration: GUANO ISLANDS OF LOBOS DE TIERRA.] But guano, though it brought to the Peruvian treasury the enormous sum of two hundred and twenty million dollars between the years 1840 and 1867, brought also such habits of extravagance in the government, that, not only did the entire sum disappear without adequate recompense to the country, but, at the time when General Mariano Ignacio Prado assumed the dictatorship, with Don Manuel Pardo as his Finance Minister, the public debt was forty-five million dollars, besides which, the government also owed the consignees of guano fifteen million dollars. Don Manuel Pardo sought to organize the finances of the nation on a more solid basis, independent of guano, by establishing permanent resources in the form of taxes and export duties; but the fatal glamour of wealth with which guano had dazzled the nation, cast his labor into the shade, and the existing evil was increased in the succeeding administration, though the intention of the energetic and public-spirited statesman, President Balta, was to put an end to the mismanagement of guano funds by employing this resource in the construction of railways and other public works.