when it becomes friable. This flour, less used in Mexico than in the islands*, may serve for the same use as flour from rice or maize.

The facility with which the banana is reproduced from its roots gives it an extraordinary advantage over fruit-trees, and even over the bread-fruit tree, which for eight months in the year is loaded with farinaceous fruit. When tribes are at war with one another and destroy the trees, the disaster is felt for a long time. A plantation of bananas is renewed by suckers in the space of a few months.

We hear it frequently repeated in the Spanish colonies, that the inhabitants of the warm region (tierra caliente) will never awake from the state of apathy in which for centuries they have been plunged, till a royal cedula shall order the destruction of the banana plantations (platanares). The remedy is violent, and those who propose it with so much warmth do not in general display more activity than the lower people, whom they would force to work by augmenting the number of their wants. It is to be hoped that industry will make progress among the Mexicans without recurring to means of destruction. When we consider, however, the facility with which our species can be maintained in a climate where bananas are produced, we are not to be astonished that in the equinoxial region of the new continent civili

See the interesting Memoir of M. de Tussac, in his Flore des Antilles, p. 60.

zation first commenced on the mountains in a soil of inferior fertility, and under a sky less favourable to the development of organized beings, in whom necessity even awakes industry. At the foot of the Cordillera, in the humid vallies of the intendancies of Vera Cruz, Valladolid, and Guadalaxara, a man who merely employs two days in the week in a work by no means laborious, may procure subsistence for a whole family. Yet such is the love of his native soil, that the inhabitant of the mountains, whom the frost of a single night frequently deprives of the whole hopes of his harvest, never thinks of descending into the fertile but thinly inhabited plains, where nature showers in vain her blessings and her treasures.

The same region in which the banana is cultivated produces also the valuable plant of which the root affords the flour of manioc, or magnoc. The green fruit of the musa is eaten dressed, like the bread fruit, or the tuberous root of the potatoe; but the flour of the manioc is converted into bread, and furnishes to the inhabitants of warm countries what the Spanish colonists call pan de tierra caliente. The maize, as we shall afterwards see, affords the great advantage of being cultivated under the tropics, from the level of the ocean to elevations which equal those of the highest summits of the Pyrenees. It possesses that extraordinary flexibility of organization for which the vegetables of the family of the gramina are charac

terised; and it even possesses it in a higher degree than the cerealia of the old continent, which suffer under a burning sun, while the maize vegetates vigorously in the warmest regions of the earth. The plant whose root yields the nutritive flour of the manioc takes its name from juca, a word of the language of Haity, or St. Domingo. It is only successfully cultivated within the tropics; and the cultivation of it in the mountainous part of Mexico never rises above the absolute height of six or eight hundred metres *. This height is much surpassed by that of the camburi, or banana of the Canaries, a plant which grows nearer the central table-land of the Cordilleras.

The Mexicans, like the natives of all equinoxial America, have cultivated, from the remotest antiquity, two kinds of juca, which the botanists, in their inventory of species, have united under the name of jatropha manihot. They distinguish, in the Spanish colony, the sweet (dulce) from the tart or bitter (amarga) juca. The root of the former, which bears the name of camagnoc at Cayenne, may be eaten without danger, while the other is a very active poison. The two may be made into bread; however, the root of the bitter juca is generally used for this purpose, the poisonous juice of which is carefully separated from the fecula before making the bread of the manioc,

* 1968 and 2624 feet. Trans.

called cazavi, or cassave. This separation is operated by compressing the root after being grated down in the cibucan, which is a species of long sack. It appears from a passage of Oviedo (lib. vii. c. 2), that the juca dulce, which he calls boniata, and which is the huacamote of the Mexicans, was not found originally in the West India islands, and that it was transplanted from the neighbouring continent. "The boniata," says Oviedo," is like that of the continent; it is not poisonous, and may be eaten with its juice either raw or prepared." The natives carefully separate in their fields (conucos) the two species of jatropha.

It is very remarkable that plants, of which the chemical properties are so very different, are yet so very difficult to distinguish from their exterior characters. Brown, in his Natural History of Jamaica, imagined he found these characters in dissecting the leaves. He calls the sweet juca, sweet cassava, jatropha foliis palmatis lobis incertis; and the bitter or tart juca, common cassava, jatropha 'foliis palmatis pentadactylibus. But having examined many plantations of manihot, I found that the two species of jatropha, like. all cultivated plants with lobed or palmated leaves, vary prodigiously in their aspect. I observed that the natives distinguish the sweet from the poisonous manioc, not so much from the superior whiteness of the stalk and the reddish

colour of the leaves as from the taste of the root, which is not tart or bitter. It is with the culti vated jatropha as with the sweet orange-tree, which botanists cannot distinguish from the bitter orange tree, but which, however, according to the beautiful experiments of M. Galesio, is a primitive species, propagated from the grain, as well as the bitter orange-tree. Several naturalists, from the example of Doctor Wright, of Jamaica, have taken the sweet juca for the true jatropha janipha of Linnæus, or the jatropha frutescens of Löffling*. But this last species, which is the jatropha carthaginensis of Jacquin, differs from it essentially by the form of the leaves (lobis utrinque sinuatis), which resemble those of the papayer. I very much doubt whether the jatropha can be transformed by cultivation into the jatropha manihot. It appears equally improbable that the sweet juca is a poisonous jatropha, which, by the care of man, or the effect of a long cultivation, has gradually lost the acidity' of its juices. The juca amarga of the American fields has remained the same for centuries, though planted and cultivated like the juca dulce. Nothing is more mysterious than this difference of interior organization in cultivated vegetables, of which the exterior forms are nearly the same.

Raynal† has advanced that the manioc was

Beza til Spanska Loenderna, 1758, p. 309.

↑ Histoire Philosophique, tom. iii. p. 212-214.