to the east, and on down through the rich province of Yungas to the south, are the finest tropical forests within the Amazonian basin, containing in all sixty-five kinds of rare and beautiful cabinet woods of prodigious growth and great commercial value. In the warm valleys of Mapiri and Yungas, and especially in the latter, grow enormous quantities of tropical fruits, sugar cane, rice, coffee, coca, cocoa, tobacco, and aromatic gums and spices, while skirting the banks of the Itenez or Guapore, the Beni, Madre de Dios and the Purus rivers, are the great rubber forests where is produced the finest "Para rubber" known to the trade.
Although the northern and northeastern territory of Bolivia, here denominated "the Beni country," is by common consent "a land flowing with milk and honey" whose inhabitants, according to George Earl Church, "gaze upon a wealth sufficient to pay the national debts of the world," it is for the most part as little known to the world as "Darkest Africa," and under present conditions, its vast natural wealth is even less available.
In point of time and means of communication, it is, with the exception of Santa Cruz, farther from the chief centers of Bolivian population than the latter are from the United States or Europe. So remote and difficult of access is this region, that Señor Lucio P. Velasco, a rubber merchant of Trinidad, on a recent trip, chose, rather than endure the hardships of a six weeks' to two months' overland journey, to travel via the Mamore, Madeira, and Amazon rivers to the Atlantic Ocean; thence to Colon and across the Isthmus of Panama; thence down the Pacific coast to Mollendo, Peru; thence across Peru by rail to Lake Titicaca, and thence by steamer back again into Bolivian territory at the end of a ninety days' journey.
