The cutting and shipment of wood is one of the oldest and most important aspects of Brazilian trade with Portugal. The rich red dye produced from the tree called pau brasil or Brazil wood was esteemed so highly that at first it outweighed in importance all other products of the colony. Most historians agree that the very name of Brazil is derived from this wood. Guarded as a royal monopoly throughout the colonial period, the wood trade ranked with the sugar, tobacco and gold of Brazil as one of the principal sources of revenue of the Portuguese crown. When woods for building were added to the exportation of pau brasil, the trade assumed a new importance, for these woods furnished the mother country with the sinews both of war and commerce, providing the hulls and masts of countless vessels that defended and brought together the distant domains of the Portuguese empire.

Despite its vital role in Latin America's ongoing struggle for economic development, Latin-American scientific and technical education remains a neglected topic among historians. Authors also tend to view it in simplistic terms. While some have seen scientific and technical institutes as agents of Latin America's “dependency” on the North Atlantic world, others have seen them as vehicles of Progress, or have stressed the way in which graduates (scientists and technical professionals) have acted as “anti-dependency guerillas.” Evidence from Colombia, however, confounds any simple view. The founding of the country's first program for geological and petroleum engineers at the National School of Mines in Medellín reflected nationalistic desires to increase Colombian control over the oil industry and subsoil resources in general. Yet, Colombia's national energy policies have not led to state control of the industry as in the case of other major oil-producing countries, i.e., Mexico. What explains this apparent gap between desires and deeds? The following essay seeks an answer by tracing the origins of the geological and petroleum engineering program as well as the ideas and activities of graduates who have been directly involved in developing their country's oil and other resources. Above all, it highlights Colombians' pragmatic approach to development concerns.

The Subject which has been assigned to me by the Academy of American Franciscan History as my contribution to the homage being rendered to this illustrious son of Mallorca, would require a very lengthy paper if it were to be treated with the amplitude which it deserves. But the restricted limits of a conference such as this, as well as the multiple pastoral duties of my episcopal office, impose upon me a brevity which will reduce this study to a few brush-strokes which, though modest, indicate the relation between Fray Junípero Serra and his fatherland.

Books of travel and books inspired by travel have probably been more popular in Great Britain than any other literary form, with the exception of novels.

This was especially true in the nineteenth century, when travel, owing to the lack of today's facilities, was reserved for the relative few. During that period, photography had not yet replaced the written word, as is happening in our own generation. The nineteenth-century Englishman wandered through the medium of a travel book and not through newsreels, travelogues, and even full-length movies. Today, the Englishman, like the American, is able to sit in his living room and see the world on his television screen. He is not dependent on literature to the extent that his grandfather or great-grandfather was. For the Englishman of the nineteenth century, therefore, travel literature was very important. Often, these books furnished the only source of information concerning strange lands and strange peoples.

I SHOULD like to ask you gentlemen to allow me, in the very beginning, to set limits to my task. The most imposing of these limitations are my own. It would be unbecoming of me to make a tacit profession of authority on the Enlightenment in English America by discoursing on the subject. I have, moreover, never made a frontal assault on the broad field of theology in the Latin world, for I regard the subject as universal, well-known to historical theologists, and when known for Europe generally predictable for America. There is also a relation between the Enlightenment in Spain and the Enlightenment in America, but what happens in America cannot be absolutely foretold by what happens in Spain. I shall therefore treat Spain, when I treat it at all, as only a back-drop for the American scene.

The general framework of the provisional chapter appears to rest upon discussion of the expansion of European Christianity in the New World, of factors which influenced the course of this religious expansion, and of the influence which, in its turn, the Christian religion exercised on the new society. The emphasis of the entire discussion falls, therefore, upon Christianity, and the religious heritages of the Indians and Negroes are noticed only as providing elements absorbed by a syncretism with Christianity.

The Regional Security provisions of the Rio Treaty of Mutual Assistance dealing with individual and collective defense, along with the structural and juridical reorganization of the inter-American system of Bogotá in 1948, constitute to a certain degree a return to Bolivarian political concepts of a Hispanic-American union or confederation. This was the dominant theme and leitmotiv of inter-American relations from 1830 to 1865. It is our purpose in this present study to present the attitude and position of Chile towards these expressions of hemisphere solidarity during this period of the mid-nineteenth century.