[197] Ibañez (‘Histoire du Paraguay sous les Jésuites’) states the hides sold at about three dollars apiece.
[198] The arroba was twenty-five pounds.
[199] These figures are from Brabo’s inventories.
[200] Ibañez states that only eighty-four dollars a year were set apart for the maintenance of each priest.
[201] Dean Funes (‘Ensayo de le Historia Civil del Paraguay’, etc.) puts it at a million reales, which almost equals £20,800.
Ibañez (‘La Republica Jesuitica’), with the noble disregard of consequences so noticeable in most polemical writers, boldly alters this to a million dollars, his object being to prove that the Jesuits exacted exorbitant taxation from the neophytes.
[202] The honey of the missions was celebrated, and the wax made by the small bee called ‘Opemus’, according to Charlevoix (livre v., p. 285), ‘était d’une blancheur qui n’avait rien de pareil, et ces neophytes ont consacré tout qu’ils en peuvent avoir à bruler devant les images de la Ste. Vierge.’
[203] In the inventory of the mission of San José I find: ‘Item, doce pares de grillos’; but I am bound to say that in this instance they were for the use of ‘los Guaicurus infieles prisioneros que estan en dicha mision.’
[204] ‘Il Cristianesimo Felice nelle Missione dei Padri della Compagnia di Jesu nel Paraguay’.
[205] ‘L’Histoire du Paraguay sous les Jésuites’, Amsterdam, 1700, lxxv.