The woods produce large and durable timber, well calculated for building. Of their trees, all of which retain their Indian names, some yield very fine gums. The _jacarandá_, called in England rose-wood, is here very common. Many of their shrubs bear beautiful flowers, and are very aromatic. Among the innumerable creeping plants which clothe the soil of their uncleared lands, there are some distinguished as infallible antidotes to the bite of venomous reptiles; one in particular, called the _coração de Jesus_[20], is universally esteemed.
Beyond the plain which nearly encircles S. Paulo, the country is hilly, or rather mountainous. Had the period of my stay been longer, I should have devoted some time to a geological tour in that district; but having urgent reasons to hasten my departure for Rio de Janeiro, I had leisure to make only one excursion of this kind. The governor invited me to visit the old gold-mines of Jaraguá, the first discovered in Brazil, which were now his property, together with a farm in their vicinity, distant about twenty-four miles from the city. We travelled along a tolerable, and in some places, fine road, in a southerly direction, for twelve miles, and crossed the Tieti. This river is here considerably larger and deeper than in the neighbourhood of S. Paulo; it has an excellent wooden bridge, free from toll. On its banks there are some situations truly enviable; fine rich virgin lands covered with timber, and capable of producing, not only the necessaries, but the luxuries of life, in a hundred-fold degree, if properly cultivated. It was melancholy to behold a territory, which, for its teeming soil and genial climate, deserves to be called a paradise, neglected and solitary, like that of Eden after the fall; while its infatuated possessors, like the offspring of Cain, hungering for gold, kept aloof from the rich feast which nature here spread before them.
After travelling onward four leagues, we arrived at the ancient mines of Jaraguá, famed for the immense treasures they produced nearly two centuries ago, when at the ports of Santos and S, Vicente, whence the gold was shipped for Europe, this district was regarded as the Peru of Brazil. The face of the country is uneven and rather mountainous. The rock, where it appeared exposed, I found to be granite, and sometimes gneiss, containing a portion of hornblende, with mica. The soil is red, and remarkably ferruginous, in many places apparently of great depth. The gold lies, for the most part, in a stratum of rounded pebbles and gravel, called _cascalho_, immediately incumbent on the solid rock. In the valleys, where there is water, occur frequent excavations, made by the gold-washers, to a considerable extent, some of them fifty or a hundred feet wide, and eighteen or twenty deep. On many of the hills, where water can be collected for washing, particles of gold are found in the soil, scarcely deeper than the roots of the grass.