February 1.
Reapers of "The Times" must have been not a little surprised (even, some might feel, appalled) on unwrapping the last delivery from home to find, in addition to the ordinary number of December 28, a supplement of no fewer than seventy pages devoted to an exhaustive study, with illustrations, of the history and progress of the ten South American Republics. The special occasion of this supplement is the centenary of the declaration of the Argentine Republic which will be celebrated on May 25 next, that declaration being the precursor of similar movements within the sab-sequent ten years by Chile, Peru and Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela; and regarded only as apiece of journalistic enterprise, the supplement is traly beyond all praise. The opening pages are naturally devoted to Argentina, giving the tory of its early struggles and Inter development, and conveying an impressive moral by means of pictures of its great cities, its harbours and its cattle ranches. Following upon this we find a convenient historical summary of the life of the ten Republics, an analysis of their constitutions and some useful statistics of their foreign trade. Their commercial relations with the different countries of Europe are dealt with independent. ly by "The Times" correspondents in European capitals. The neral features of each country, the agricultural and industrial resources, and particularly the great mineral wealth of the South American continent are examined on subsequent pages. In this connexion we may notice a short but instructive article on the Brazilian diamond industry; for here we touch a romantic note. For nearly one hundred and fifty years until eclipsed, perhaps only temporarily, by South Africa, Brazilian diamonds reigned supreme, and to this ds Brazil has a monopoly of the carbona do, or black diamond. Railways and waterways, climate, literature, social topics, sport (let us not omit to mention in passing the popularity of cricket and golf among the Argentinos) are all fully reviewed: indeed the supplement stands out as a moderate-sized encyclopedia on South America.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.