Most of the above-named species of woods are of large growth, and well calculated for ship-building. It is remarkable that this district produces none of the dye-wood called Brazil wood.
Here are innumerable fruit-trees and shrubs which I have omitted to particularize. Tobacco is cultivated in some parts, and is always manufactured into roll by uniting the leaves with each other, and twisting them with a winch. By this operation the juice is expressed, and after a short exposure to the atmosphere, the color of the tobacco changes from green to black.
Of wild animals, ounces are the most common; they are met with of various colors, some black and brown-red. Tapirs or antas are not unfrequent, but I saw only the footsteps of some of them. Wild hogs breed here in great numbers, and also long-bearded monkeys; the latter, when asleep, snore so loud as to astonish the traveller. The most formidable reptiles are the corral snake, the surocucu, the surocucu-tinga, and the jararaca, all said to be mortally venomous, none of which I ever saw on the journey, except a small one of the former species.
The prevailing method of clearing and cultivating the land here, is precisely similar to that practised in the neighbourhood of S. Paulo. After the timber and underwood have been cut down and burnt (often very imperfectly), the negresses dibble the seed; in about six weeks a slight weeding is performed, and then the ground is let alone till harvest. The seed-time begins in October and lasts until November; the maize is ripe in four or five months. The next year they commonly sow beans on the corn land, which they then let lie, and proceed to clear new ground. It is not common to molest the land from which they have had two crops in succession, before eight or ten years have elapsed.
The sugar-cane and mandioca require from fourteen to eighteen months. Coffee, planted by shoots, bears fruit in two years, and is in perfection in five or six years. Cottons and palma Christi, raised from seed, bear the first year.
Transplanting is only practised with tobacco; engrafting is little known and rarely attempted.
The Indian corn is ground by a horizontal water-wheel, which acquires great velocity from the rush of water upon it. On the upper end is fixed the mill-stone, which makes from fifty to sixty revolutions in a minute. They have likewise a mode of pounding the corn into flour, by a machine called a Sloth. Near a current of water a large wooden mortar is placed, the pestle of which is mortised into the end of a lever twenty-five or thirty feet long, resting upon a fulcrum at five-eights of its length. The extremity of the shorter arm of this beam is scooped out, so as to receive a sufficient weight of water to raise the other end, to which appends the pestle, and to discharge itself when it has sunk to a given point. The alternate emptying and filling of this cavity cause the elevation and fall of the pestle, which take place about four times per minute. This contrivance surpasses all others in simplicity; and in a place where the waste of water is of no consequence, it completely answers its purpose.
HORIZONTAL CORN MILL.—POUNDING MACHINE.
