there are extensive regions of choice arable lands, where may be grown all the products common to a tropical zone, while the mountain spurs are everywhere peculiarly adapted to the production of the finest quality of coffee.
The territory adjacent to the Rio Grande, and extending northeasterly to the river Piray, presents not only a charming landscape, but is unexcelled for growing sugar cane, maize, and kindred productions. In the province of Chiquitos and other districts, cotton and indigo grow wild, while large quantities of the finest quality of vanilla are found in the same state in the swamps. The forests are the homes of a great variety of tropical birds of rare and beautiful plumage; the flora and faund are of surpassing interest; medicinal plants of great value and almost every variety of rare and beautiful cabinet woods grow untouched in these virgin forests and uninhabited plains; while the charming valleys of Cochabamba are rich in cereals, and the province of Yungas is a vast storehouse of semi-tropical wealth. Not only has nature thus distributed these rich gifts of her bounty throughout the regions of eastern Bolivia with unrestrained prodigality, but, in the language of Col. Church, "there is abundant evidence that not a river that carries its waters from Bolivia to the Amazon but washes through auriferous deposits as rich as any in California or Australia," while the hills of San Javier have been producing gold for many years, and it is believed that when these remote sections of the country are properly explored and prospected, extensive deposits of this precious metal will be discovered.
THE BENI COUNTRY.
The Department of Beni, or Veni, as it is sometimes written, is one of the largest and most sparsely settled political divisions of the country. Its capital is Trinidad, situated on the river Mamoré, in the province of Mojos or Cercado. It embraces the provinces of Mojos or Cercado, Secure, Magdalena, Reyes, and
