Book Description

Excerpt from Mineral Resources of Minas Geraes (Brazil) Every writer who has made a study of the mineral resources of Brazil has been struck by the amazing anomaly that proportionately as the incalculable extent and richness of those resources has become better known, the mining industry of the country has diminished. Many reasons have been advanced to explain the enigma that the facts present. The liberation of the slave-workers, bad legislation and exorbitant taxation, lack of railway communication, political unrest and financial instability, and the incompetence and dishonesty that have attended the exploitation of the mines and the management of the companies that have been formed to work them, are among the numerous disabilities from which the industry has suffered in the past; but while these drawbacks are being steadily removed, the disfavour, into which mining enterprise in the Republic has fallen, remains. The Brazilians themselves, apparently indifferent to the enormous national asset which these minerals represent, have devoted their activities to agricultural advancement, and it would almost seem that these people, with a score of potential gold-fields at their very doors, are immune from that "gold fever" which has rendered possible the recent stupendous progress that has been made by a host of other countries less rich in minerals than their own. The diamond industry of Brazil is a dwindling enterprise in the hands of individual prospectors and ill-equipped bands of miners, although for a century and a half which succeeded the discovery of the first brilliant in Diamantina, Brazil's output of diamonds exceeded that of any other country. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.