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longer, I should have devoted some time to a geological tour in 

 that district ; but having urgent reasons to hasten my departure for 

 Rio de Janeiro, I had leisure to take only one excursion of this 

 kind. The governor invited me to visit the old gold-mines of Jara- 

 gua, the first discovered in Brazil, which were now his property, 

 together with a farm in their vicinity, distant about twenty-four 

 miles from the city. We travelled along a tolerable, and in some 

 places, fine road, in a southerly direction, for twelve miles, and 

 crossed the Tieti. This river is here considerably larger and deeper 

 than in the neighbourhood of St. Paul's ; it has an excellent wooden 

 bridge, free from toll. On its banks there are some situations truly 

 enviable ; fine rich virgin lands covered with timber, and capable 

 of producing, not only the necessaries, but the luxuries of life, in 

 a hundredfold degree, if properly cultivated. It was melancholy 

 to behold a territory, which, for its teeming soil and genial climate, 

 deserves to be called a paradise, negkcted and solitary like that of 

 Eden after the fall; while its infatuated possessors, like the offspring 

 of Cain, hungering for gold, kept aloof from the rich feast which 

 nature here spread before them. 



After travelling onward four leagues, we arrived at the ancient 

 mines of Jaragua, famed for the immense treasures they produced 

 nearly two centuries ago, when at the ports of Santos and St. Vin- 

 cent, whence the gold was shipped for Europe, this district was re- 

 garded as tiie Peru of Brazil. The face of the country is uneven 

 and rather mountainous. The rock, where it is exposed, appears 

 to be primitive granite, inclining to gneiss, with a portion of horn- 

 blende-, and frequently mica. The soil is red, and remarkably fer- 

 ruginous, in many places apparently of great depth. The gold lies, 

 for the most part, in a stratum of rounded pebbles and gravel, 

 called cascalhao, immediately incumbent on the solid rock. In the 

 valleys, where there is water, occur frequent excavations, made by 

 the gold-washers, to a considerable extent, some of them fifty or a 

 hundred feet wide, a^id eighteen or twenty deep. On many of the 



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