consequence is that the annual
produce of each district fluctuates, and is greater or less in the
proportion of the quantity of bearing vines to the whole number. To enter
minutely into the detail of this business will not afford much
information or entertainment to the generality of readers, who will
however be surprised to hear that pepper-planting, though scarcely an
art, so little skill appears to be employed in its cultivation, has
nevertheless been rendered an abstruse science by the investigations
which able men have bestowed upon the subject. These took their rise from
censures conveyed for supposed mismanagement, when the investment, or
annual provision of pepper, decreased in comparison with preceding years,
and which was not satisfactorily accounted for by unfavourable seasons.
To obviate such charges it became necessary for those who superintended
the business to pay attention to and explain the efficient causes which
unavoidably occasioned this fluctuation, and to establish general
principles of calculation by which to determine at any time the probable
future produce of the different residencies. These will depend upon a
knowledge of the medium produce of a determinate number of vines, and the
medium number to which this produce is to be applied; both of which are
to be ascertained only from a comprehensive view of the subject, and a
nice discrimination. Nothing general can be determined from detached
instances. It is not the produce of one particular plantation in one
particular stage of bearing and in one particular season, but the mean
produce of all the various classes of bearing vines collectively, drawn
from the experience of several years, that can alone be depended on in
calculations of this nature. So in regard to the median number of vines
presumed to exist at any residency in a future year, to which the medium
produce of a certain number, one thousand, for instance, is to be
applied, the quantity of young vines of the first, second, and third year
must not be indiscriminately advanced, in their whole extent, to the next
annual stage, but a judicious allowance founded on experience must be
made for the accidents to which, in spite of a resident's utmost care,
they will be exposed. Some are lost by neglect or death of the owner;
some are destroyed by inundations, others by elephants and wild
buffaloes, and some by unfavourable seasons, and from these several
considerations the number of vines will