Cherrie and Miller spent the day at the really capital zoological gardens, with the curator, Miss Snethlage.  Miss Snethlage, a German lady, is a first rate field and closet naturalist, and an explorer of note, who has gone on foot from the Xingu to the Tapajos.  Most wisely she has confined the Belen zoo to the animals of the lower Amazon valley, and in consequence I know of no better local zoological gardens.  She has an invaluable collection of birds and mammals of the region; and it was a privilege to meet her and talk with her.

We also met Professor Farrabee, of the University of Pennsylvania, the ethnologist.  He had just finished a very difficult and important trip, from Manaos by the Rio Branco to the highlands of Guiana, across them on foot, and down to the seacoast of British Guiana.  He is an admirable representative of the men who are now opening South America to scientific knowledge.

On May 7 we bade good-by to our kind Brazilian friends and sailed northward for Barbados and New York.

Zoologically the trip had been a thorough success.  Cherrie and Miller had collected over twenty-five hundred birds, about five hundred mammals, and a few reptiles, batrachians, and fishes.  Many of them were new to science; for much of the region traversed had never previously been worked by any scientific collector.

Of course, the most important work we did was the geographic work, the exploration of the unknown river, undertaken at the suggestion of the Brazilian Government, and in conjunction with its representatives.  No piece of work of this kind is ever achieved save as it is based on long continued previous work.  As I have before said, what we did was to put the cap on the pyramid that had been built by Colonel Rondon and his associates of the Telegraphic Commission during the six previous years.  It was their scientific exploration of the chapadao, their mapping the basin of the Juruena, and their descent of the Gy-Parana that rendered it possible for us to solve the mystery of the River of Doubt.

The work of the commission, much the greatest work of the kind ever done in South America, is one of the many, many achievements which the republican government of Brazil has to its credit.  Brazil has been blessed beyond the average of her Spanish-American sisters because she won her way to republicanism by evolution rather than revolution.  They plunged into the extremely difficult experiment of democratic, of popular, self-government, after enduring the atrophy of every quality of self-control, self-reliance, and initiative throughout three withering centuries of existence under the worst and most foolish form of colonial government, both from the civil and the religious standpoint, that has ever existed.  The marvel is not that some of them failed, but that some of them have eventually succeeded in such striking fashion.  Brazil, on the contrary, when she achieved independence, first exercised it under the form of an authoritative