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of pirates, English, Spanish, and Netherlander, who periodically plundered and harried the coast.

Their base-line laid down, the Portuguese settlers proceeded to occupy the interior. With a thousand difficulties, they scaled the terrible heights of Paranápiassába—"the chain which looks towards the ocean"—loftiest of the maritime range that half encircles the Santos basin with its rocky arms and regular crest. They swarmed up cliffs, they let themselves down from crags that invaded the upper strata of ether, and they compared the country with the "region of the moon." Those slopes, whose trees seem from afar to rise in the gentlest steps and on the most regular gradients, proved heart-breaking steeps of rock and tree, of roots and of soft humus, the decay of vegetation, into which men sank to the knee. They swam the river-courses, and they bridged the torrents and rapids with trunks felled upon the banks. Night and day they spent in an atmosphere now torrid and humid, then raw and frigid; sleeping upon the ground or in hammocks slung to the branches. What fancy could have traced, in those times, the line of rail which now bears the traveller over all these terrors and hardships, occupying three hours to perform what to former generations cost at least as many days?

The metamorphosis has, on the other hand, caused the traveller to lose much of the poetry of the primeval forest and of the eternal sea. We no longer, from the Alto da Serra of the mule-road, view, as with a bird's eye, the superb panorama of the lowlands; the thin white surf-line breaking in far perspective on the yellow sands; the manifold surface-drains and sea-arms, winding like ribbons of silver amongst the netherlands, and the islands forested with the sombre green man grove; the infinite varieties of town and village, of field and plantation; the slopes with gigantic timber falling below our feet, and on one side the roaring, dashing cataract of the "Rio dos Pedros," a snowy sheet