`natural de Yorca'), Filge, Limp, Pifereti, Enis, and Asperger,
the quaint medical writer on the virtues of plants found
in the mission territory, show how many foreign Jesuits were actually
to be found in the reductions of Paraguay. For more information
on this matter see the `Coleccion de Documentos relativos a/ la Expulsion
de los Jesuitas de la Republica Argentina y Paraguay',
published and collected by Francisco Javier Brabo, Madrid, 1872.
--

Later the historical researches of Sir William Stirling Maxwell
drew some attention to it. To-day hardly any literature of Europe
is so little studied in England. Still leaving apart
the purely literary treasures of the language, it is in Spanish,
and almost alone in Spanish, that the early history of America is to be found.

After the struggle for independence which finished about 1825,
some interest was excited in the Spanish-American countries,
stimulated by the writings of Humboldt; but when it became apparent
that on the whole those countries could never be occupied
by Northern Europeans, interest in them died out except for purposes connected
with the Stock Exchange. Yet there is a charm which attaches to them
which attaches to no other countries in the world. It was there
that one of the greatest dramas, and certainly the greatest adventure
in which the human race has engaged, took place. What Africa has been
for the last twenty years, Spanish America was three hundred years ago,
the difference being that, whereas modern adventure in Africa
goes on under full observation, and deals in the main with absolutely
uncivilized peoples, the conquest of South America was invested
with all the charm of novelty, and brought the conquerors into contact with
at least two peoples almost as advanced in most of the arts of civilization