government, the salary amounting to about 70l., or the same sum as the priests receive. Besides common schools a well-endowed classical seminary is maintained at Pará, to which the sons of most of the planters and traders in the interior are sent to complete their education. The province returns its quota of members every four years to the lower and upper houses of the imperial parliament. Every householder has a vote. Trial by jury has been established, the jurymen being selected from householders, no matter what their race or colour; and I have seen the white merchant, the negro husbandman, the mameluco, the mulatto and the Indian, all sitting side by side on the same bench. Altogether the constitution of government in Brazil seems to combine happily the principles of local self-government and centralisation, and only requires a proper degree of virtue and intelligence in the people to lead the nation to great prosperity.
The province of Pará, or, as we may now say, the two provinces of Pará and the Amazons contain an area of 800,000 square miles; the population of which is only about 230,000, or in the ratio of one person to four square miles. The country is covered with forests, and the soil fertile in the extreme even for a tropical country. It is intersected throughout by broad and deep navigable rivers. It is the pride of the Paraenses to call the Amazons the Mediterranean of South America. It perhaps deserves the name, for not only have the main river and its principal tributaries an immense expanse of water bathing the shores of extensive and varied regions, but there is also throughout a system of back-
