The universal geography : earth and its inhabitants

CHAPTER XIII.
MATTO GROSSO.
ITII ibo exception of a narrow central zone, the vast region of
Matto Grosso, that is, the " Great Forest," nearly five times the
size of the British Isles, is a mere wilderness with undefined
limits, and, if not actually unknown, at least abandoned to the
aborigines and wild beasts. "With the rest of Brazil it is con-
nected only by the tracks of hunters, or the course of the navigable waters rising
within its borders. Its very name has no distinct geographical meaning, for the
expression is applied to many distinct regions, which belong onh* in small measure
to the Amazonian selva. Most of the territory is in fact comprised in the zone
of uplands which form the waterparting between the great northern and southern
basins, and which are overgrown not with forest trees but with stunted fcrub
and bush.
Another section consists of the partly dried bed of an old inland sea, whose
shores are thinly wooded. The whole of the civilised population is less than that
of a single suburb of Rio de Janeiro, and in an area of some 530,000 square
miles the inhabitants, settled and savage, fall considerablj' short of 200,000.
Yet no other country exceeds certain parts of the Brazilian wilderness in fertilit3%
and within its borders there is certainly ample space for a population of at leust
100,000,000.
HisToiiic Slrvev.
Except in the extreme south and west, Matto Grosso remained unvisited by
the Spanish conquerors, who, after establishing themselves in Peru and in the
Plate estuary, made no serious attempt to connect these two sections of their
prodigious domain, or at least limited their efforts in this direction to the explora-
tion of the Upper Paraguay and of the Bolivian plateaux.
Hence the Paulist kidnappers were the first whites to penetrate into jfatto