The diamond mines in the neighborhood of the old town of Diamantina (also easily accessible by rail) have been famous since the first discoveries were made in 1727. In these parts several of the most valuable gems in the world are said to have been found—for instance, the Braganza, the richest of the Crown jewels of Portugal, the Regent, named in honor of Dom João VI, the _Estrella do Sul_ (Star of the South), that weighed a hundred and twenty-five carats after lapidation and was purchased by the Rajah of Baroda, it is said, for $15,000,000, and the Dresden, which weighed sixty-five carats after lapidation and was also bought by an Indian prince. For many years, until the South African mines came into competition, this was the chief source of the world’s supply. The country is also rich in amethysts, tourmalines, topazes and aquamarines. The State of Bahia is still the principal source of the black diamond, known as the _carbonado_. The largest _carbonado_ known was found there in 1835. It weighed 3150 carats. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ III ARGENTINA I No nation of the southern continent is better qualified than Argentina to rebuke the stupid jest that refers to the Latin-American countries as opera bouffe republics. It has a domain one-third the size of the United States, or as large as the territory lying east of the Mississippi, with Texas added, stretching from tropic heat to antarctic cold, and possessing a frontage on the Atlantic as extensive as our own coast line from Portland, Maine, to Key West, Florida. It has over 500,000,000 acres of its 1,135,840 square miles of area available for the cultivation of life-sustaining products and distributed over vast, treeless, well-watered plains, every one of which is easily accessible to the seaboard with the simplest of railway construction. These plains have no such natural obstructions to transportation as our Alleghanies or Rockies, and have for their produce a much shorter haul to the European world of consumers. Argentina has the further advantage of over 18,000 miles of up-to-date railways radiating from its port cities, and five river systems, one of which, La Plata, the outlet for the waters of the Paraná and Uruguay, is second only to the Amazon among the world’s great rivers. It is 180 miles wide at its mouth, and pours into the Atlantic a flood greater by eighty per cent. than that cast by the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico.