In the Peruvian Montaña, in its upper regions, Nature has been lavish of her products and opportunities. The rancher who should take up his abode there, with a small amount of capital, can rapidly acquire estates and wealth. Abundant harvests of almost every known product can be raised in a minimum of time. It is sufficient to cut down and burn the brush and scratch the soil and sow with any seed, to recover returns of a hundred for one. Sugar-cane, vines, maize, cocoa, coffee, and a host of products can be raised. The sugar-cane, once planted, yields perpetually, some existing plantations being more than a hundred years old. The cane frequently measures thirty feet in height, and is cut seven to nine months after sprouting. The whole Amazon Valley, when it shall have been opened up, will prove to be one of the most valuable parts of the earth's surface. Apart from topographical considerations, the sinister occurrences on the Putumayo are, to some extent, the result of a sinister human element--the Spanish and Portuguese character. The remarkable trait of callousness to human suffering which the Iberian people of Portugal and Spain--themselves a mixture of Moor, Goth, Semite, Vandal, and other peoples--introduced into the Latin American race is here shown in its intensity, and is augmented by a further Spanish quality. The Spaniard often regards the Indians as _animals_. Other European people may have abused the Indians of America, but none have that peculiar Spanish attitude towards them of frankly considering them as non-human. To-day the Indians are commonly referred to among Spaniards and Mestizos as _animales_. The present writer, in his travels in Peru and Mexico, has constantly been met with the half-impatient exclamation, on having protested against maltreatment of the Indian, of "_Son animales, Señor; no son gentes._" ("They are animals, Señor; they are not folk"). The torture or mutilation of the Indian is therefore regarded much as it would be in the case of an ox or a horse. This attitude of mind was well shown in the barbarous system of forced labour in the mines in the times of the viceroys of Peru and Mexico, where the Indians were driven into the mines by armed guards and branded on the face with hot irons. When their overtaxed strength gave way under the heavy labour, which rapidly occurred, their carcasses were pitched aside and they were replaced by other slaves. These operations of the time of the Spaniards have their counterpart in the Amazon Valley to-day. There is yet a further trait of the Latin American which to the Anglo-Saxon mind is almost inexplicable. This is the pleasure in the torture of the Indian as a _diversion_, not merely as a vengeance or "punishment." As has been shown on the Putumayo, and as happened on other occasions elsewhere, the Indians have been abused, tortured, and killed _por motivos frivolos_--that is to say, for merely frivolous reasons, or for diversion. Thus Indians are