The Amazon River is the largest in the world; it is not the longest for the Missouri-Mississippi River is longer, but it contains more water than any other river in the world. The amount of fresh water brought to the mouth of the river is so great that for more than 100 miles out to the sea the water is fresh. The Amazon is about 4,000 miles long, which is 600 miles more than the distance from New York to Liverpool. For 250 miles upstream from the mouth this river is 50 miles wide, so that it looks like a broad bay rather than a river. The main stream and the twenty-nine larger tributaries have 27,000 miles of navigable waters, which is more than any other river system in the world. If the Hudson River, which empties into the Atlantic at New York were a great stream flowing through our continent from the west so that we could enter it and sail clear across the land to Salt Lake City on a steamer, we should have about the same condition of transportation as prevails on the Amazon. Para, in the Amazon Valley, is the chief rubber port of the world. The rubber is made from the sap of the Siphonia elastica, a forest tree which grows wild in this region. Para is also noted for the quantity of cacao exported. About half a million dollars' worth of it is shipped every year, and the product all told amounts to thousands of tons. From the Amazon lowlands which are overgrown with tropical forests, mahogany, rosewood, ebony, drugs, and Brazil nuts are found.
