of the Caribbean
Sea. Cacao, rice, plantains, indigo, and cotton, besides Indian corn
and many nutritious vegetables, might be profitably cultivated to a
much larger degree than is now done. It is a curious and remarkable
fact, suggesting a striking moral, that with the inexhaustible
fertility of the soil, with an endless summer that gives the laborer
two and even three crops a year, agriculture generally yields in Cuba
a lower percentage of profit than in our stern Northern latitudes,
where the farmer has to wrench, as it were, the half-reluctant crop
from the ground. It must be remembered that in Cuba there are numerous
fruits and vegetables not enumerated in these pages, which do not
enter into commerce, and which spring spontaneously from the fertile
soil. In the possession of a thrifty population the island would be
made to blossom like a rose, but as it now is, it forms only a garden
growing wild, cultivated here and there in patches. None of the fine
natural fruits have ever been improved by careful culture and the
intelligent selection of kinds, so that in many respects they will not
compare in perfection with our average strawberries, plums, pears, and
peaches. Their unfulfilled possibilities remain to be developed by
intelligent treatment.

The plantain, which may be said to be the bread of the common people,
requires to be planted but once. The stem bears freely, like the
banana of the same family, at the end of eight months, and then
withering to the ground renews itself again from the roots. Sweet
potatoes once planted require care only to prevent their too great
luxuriance, and for this purpose a plough is passed through them
before the wet season, and as many of the vines as can be freely
plucked up are removed from the field. The sugar-cane, on virgin soil,
will last and prove productive for twenty years. The coffee shrub or
tree will bear luxuriantly for forty or fifty years. The cocoanut palm
is peculiar to all tropical climates, and in Cuba, as in the Malacca
Straits and India, bears an important share in sustaining the life of
the people, supplying milk, shade, and material for a hundred domestic
uses. It grows in luxuriant thriftiness all over the island, in high
and low land, in forests, and down to the very shore washed by the
Gulf Stream. It is always graceful and picturesque, imparting an
oriental aspect to everything which surrounds it. It is estimated
that over ten million acres of native for