FROM HUMBOLDT'S PERSONAL NARRATIVE.

The Coffee Plant.

The coffee tree flowers only the second year, and the flowering lasts only twenty-four hours. At this time the shrub has a charming aspect; seen from afar, it seems covered with snow. The produce of the third year becomes very abundant. In plantations well weeded and watered, and recently cultivated, we find trees bearing sixteen, eighteen, and even twenty pounds of coffee. In general, however, a produce of more than a pound and a half or two pounds cannot be expected from each plant; and even this is superior to the mean produce of the West India Islands. Rains at the time of the flowering, the want of water for artificial irrigations, and a patastic plant, a new species of coranthus, which clings to the branches, are extremely injurious to the coffee trees.

Sugar Cane.

Three species of sugar cane can be distinguished even at a distance, by the colour of their leaves; the ancient Creole sugar cane, the Otaheite cane, and the Batavia cane. The first has a leaf of a deeper green, the stem less thick, and the knots nearer together.—This sugar cane was the first introduced from India into Sicily, the Canary Islands and the West Indies. The second is of a lighter green; and its stem is higher, thicker, and more succulent. The whole plant displays a more luxuriant vegetation. We owe this plant to the voyages of Bougainville, Cook, and Bligh. Bougainville carried it to the Isle of France, whence it passed to Cayenne, Martinique, and since 1792, to the rest of the West India Islands. The sugar cane of Otaheite, the To of those islanders, is one of the most important acquisitions, for which colonial agriculture is indebted to the travels of naturalists. It yields not only one third more of juice than the Creolian cane on the same space of land; but from the thickness of its stem, and the tenacity of its ligneous fibres, it furnishes much more fuel. The last advantage is important to the West Indies, where the destruction of the forests has for a long time obliged the planters to use the canes deprived of their juice, to keep up the fire under their boilers.

But from the knowledge of this new plant, the progress of agriculture on the continent of Spanish America, and the introduction of the East India and Java sugars, the revolutions of St. Domingo, and the destruction of the great sugar plantations of that island, would have had a more sensible effect on the prices of colonial produce in Europe. The Otaheite sugar cane was carried from the Isle of Trinidad to Caraccas. From Caraccas it passed to Cicuta and San Gil in the kingdom of New Grenada. In our days its cultivation during twenty-five years almost entirely removed the apprehension, which was at first entirely entertained, that, transplanted to America, the plant would by degrees degenerate, and become as slender as the Creole cane. If it be a variety, it is a very constant one. The third species, the violet sugar cane, called Cana de Batavia, or de Guinea, is entirely indigenous in the island of Java, where it is cultivated in preference in the districts of Jupara and Pasuruan. Its foliage is purple, and very broad; and it is preferred in the province of Caraccas for rum. The tablones, or grounds planted with sugar canes, are divided by hedges of a collossal gramen; the latta, or gynesium with distich leaves.

American Fig Tree.

The trunks of these trees are covered with very odoriferous plants of vanilla, which, in general, flower only in the month of April.—We were here again struck with those ligneous excrescenses, which in the form of ridges, or ribs, augment, in so extraordinary a manner, and as far as twenty feet above the ground, the thickness of the trunk of the fig trees of America. I found trees twenty-two feet and a half in diameter near the roots.—These ligneous ridges sometimes separate from the trunk at a height of eight feet, and are transformed into cylindrical roots two feet thick. The tree looks as if it were supported by buttresses. This scaffolding, however, does not penetrate very deep into the earth. The lateral roots wind at the surface of the ground, and when at twenty feet distance from the trunk, they are cut with the hatchet, we see the milky juice of the fig tree gush out, which, when deprived of the vital influence of the organs of the tree, is altered and coagulates. What a wonderful combination of cells and vessels exist in these vegetable masses; in these gigantic trees of the torrid zone, which, without interruption, perhaps during a thousand years, prepare nutritious fluids, raise them to the height of 180 feet, convey them down again to the ground, and conceal beneath a rough and hard bark, under the inanimate layers of ligneous matter, all the movements of organic life!

The Cow Tree.

"Amid the great number of curious phenomena which have presented themselves to me in the course of my travels, I confess there are few that have so powerfully affected my imagination, as the aspect of the cow tree.

"Whatever relates to milk, whatever regards corn, inspires an interest, which is not merely that of the physical knowledge of things, but is connected with another order of ideas and sentiments. We can scarcely conceive how the human race could exist without farinaceous substances, and without that nourishing juice which the breast of the mother contains, and which is appropriated to the long feebleness of the infant. The amylaceous matter of corn, the object of religious veneration among so many nations, ancient and modern, is diffused in the seeds and deposited in the roots of vegetables; milk, which serves us as an aliment, appears to us exclusively the produce of animal organization.—Such are the impressions we have received in our earliest infancy; such is also the source of that astonishment which seizes us at the aspect of the tree just described. It has not here the solemn shades of forests, the majestic course of rivers, the mountains wrapped in eternal frosts, that excite our emotion.—A few drops of vegetable juice recal to our minds all the powerfulness and fecundity of nature. On the barren flank of rock grows a tree with coriaceous and dry leaves. Its large woody roots can scarcely penetrate into the stone. For several months of the year not a single shower moistens its foliage. Its branches appear dead and dried; but when its trunk is pierced, there flows from it a sweet and nourishing milk. It is at the rising of the sun that this vegetable fountain is most abundant. The blacks and natives are then seen hastening from all quarters, furnished with large bowls to receive the milk, which grows yellow, and thickens at its surface. Some employ their bowls under the tree itself, others carry the juice home to their children. We seem to see the family of a shepherd, who distributes the milk to his flock.

"I have described the sensation which the cow tree awakens in the mind of the traveller, at the first view. In examining the physical properties of animal and vegetable products, science displays them as closely linked together; but it strips them of what is marvellous, and perhaps also a part of their charms, of what excited our astonishment.—Nothing appears insolated; the chemical principles that were believed to be peculiar to animals are found in plants; a common chain links together all organic nature."