João da Silva Feijó was a Luso-Brazilian naturalist commissioned by the Portuguese Crown to conduct natural history research between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He was sent to the Cape Verde islands (1783-97) and then to the captaincy of Ceará, in Brazil (1799). Upon returning from Cape Verde to Lisbon, prior to his Brazilian mission, Feijó laid out his opinions on Brazil's gold mines in a manuscript entitled Discourse. The present article offers some preliminary comments on the ideas found in Discourse. Given its importance as part of a larger set of period texts on the mining crisis in Brazil, this manuscript - never before published - is also transcribed herein.
history of Brazil; geosciences; mining; mineralogy; natural history