GENERAL IMPRESSIONS OF BRAZIL. 507 
staii lard of the crop, thus relieving the producer of all 
responsibility and depriving the product of its true charac- 
teristics. 
If the provinces adjacent to Rio de Janeiro offer natural- 
ly the most favorable soil for the culture of coffee, it must 
not be forgotten that coffee is planted with advantage in 
the shade of the Amazonian forest, and even yields two 
annual crops wherever pains are taken to plant it. In the 
province of Ceara, where the coffee is of a superior quality, 
it is not planted on the plains, or in the low grounds, or in 
the shadow of the forest, as in the valley of the Amazons, 
but on the slopes of the hills and on the mountain heights, 
to an elevation of from fifteen hundred to two thousand 
feet and more above the level of the sea, in the Serras of 
Aratanha and Baturite and in the Serra Grande. The 
channels opened to these products should augment their 
importance, and should give rise to numerous establish- 
ments in the valley of the Amazons. 
The increased exportation of cotton from Brazil during 
the last few years is a still more marked feature in its indus- 
trial history than the large coffee crops. When, towards the 
close of the last century, cotton began to assume in England 
an importance which has ever since been increasing, Brazil 
naturally became one of the great providers of the English 
market. But it soon lost this advantage, because our 
Southern States acquired, with an extraordinary rapidity, 
an almost complete monopoly of this product. Favored by 
exceptional circumstances, North America succeeded, about 
the year 1846, in furnishing cotton at such low rates that 
all competition became impossible, and the culture of cotton 
was almost abandoned in other countries. Brazil, how- 
ever, persisted. Her annual production showed a slow but 
