EESOURCES OF BRAZIL— MINERALS. 273 



Even tlie system of parceria, leaseholds or joint tenure, is looked on 

 askance by tlie new generation of settlers from tlie Old World, who had crossed 

 the Atlantic in the hope of becoming independent freeholders. This is the 

 great question for the immediate future of Brazil. The cultivators claim the 

 land ; they even seize it in certain districts, and cultivate it for their own 

 benefit, while the title-holders seek to dispossess them. Desirous of continuing 

 under other forms the old system of bondage, they have induced the legislature 

 to vote the introduction of coolies on the plantations, under the usual conditions 

 of contract labour. But the "Celestials" are still slow to arrive; nor has the 

 Pekin Government shown itself ready to mejt the views of the Brazilian planters. 

 The few Asiatics hitherto introduced will not suffice to avert the coming storm, 

 and the struggle between the great landowners and the lackLmd classes must 

 grow to a head. 



MmixG Ikdustry. 



Although agriculture now takes the first place in economic importance, in the 

 last century mining operations supplied by far the largest share of the foreign 

 exports. Compared with Mexico and Peru, lands of silver, Brazil was essentially 

 the land of gold. In the very first century of the occupation goldfields had 

 been discovered, especially at Taubate, between Rio and S. Paulo, and the 

 Paulistas, in their onward movement to the north and west, soon came upon rios de 

 Oitro, "gold rivers," in almost every part of the vast region comprised between 

 the Andes and the Bahia coastlands. Most of these deposits are now abandoned, 

 the mines owned by Portuguese adventurers in Peru being naturiilly the first to 

 be closed, owing to the penal measures taken by the Spanish viceroys, jointly 

 with the inquisition, against these intruders, charged with preparing the conquest 

 of the land. Many of the Portuguese pioneers are said to have avoided the 

 dreaded tribunal of the inquisition by flight, after first throwing their treasures 

 into the lakes-and rivers, and then blocking the galleries leading to the under- 

 ground works. Even the Goyaz mines, which, in the eighteenth century, yielded 

 larger quantities of the precious metal, are no longer worked, except by a few 

 searchers, by primitive processes. 



Gold also occurs in Parana, Eio Grande do Sul, Santa Catharina, Maranhà-o 

 and Piauhy, but is nowhere systematically mined. At present nearly all the 

 metal exported from Brazil comes from Minas Geraes, the mining State in a pre- 

 eminent sense. Towards the end of the seventeenth century a beginning was 

 made with the washing of the sands and gravels (^cascalhos) detached from the 

 auriferous reefs, and almost everywhere covered with a ferruginous conglomerate 

 (ca)iga). In 1698 the Ouro Preto mountains were attacked, and now the natives 

 were compelled to work under the lash. Nearly the whole of the ground was 

 turned over for a distance of 280 miles, and a breadth of 140 miles on both sides 

 of the main range, and in the valleys draining to the Rio das Velhas. From 

 the route between Ouro Preto and Sahara is seen an open cutting carried to a 



