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than probable that before the Russians shall clear the interval which separates them from the Spaniards, some other enterprizing power will attempt to establish colonies either on the coast of New Georgia, or on the fertile islands in its vicinity.

BOOK IV.

STATE OF THE AGRICULTURE OF NEW SPAIN. METALLIC MINES.

1

CHAPTER IX.

Vegetable productions of the Mexican territory.-Progress of the cultivation of the soil.-Influence of the mines on cultivation.-Plants which contribute to the nourishment of man.

WE have run over the immense extent of territory comprehended under the denomination of New Spain. We have rapidly described the limits of each province, the physical aspect of the country, its temperature, its natural fertility, and the progress of a nascent population. It is now time to enter more minutely into the state of agriculture and territorial wealth of Mexico.

An empire extending from the sixteenth to the thirty-seventh degree of latitude affords us from its geometrical position, all the modifications of climate to be found on transporting ourselves from the banks of the Senegal to Spain, or from the Malabar coast to the steppes of the great Bucharia. This variety of climate is also aug

mented by the geological constitution of the country, by the mass and extraordinary form of the Mexican mountains, which we have described in the third chapter. On the ridge and declivity of the Cordilleras the temperature of each table. land varies as it is more or less elevated; not merely insulated peaks, of which the summits approach the region of perpetual snow, are covered with oaks and pines, but whole provinces spontaneously produce alpine plants; and the cultivator inhabiting the torrid zone frequently loses the hopes of his harvest from the effects of frost or the abundance of snow.

Such is the admirable distribution of heat on the globe, that in the aerial ocean we meet with colder strata in proportion as we ascend, while in the depth of the sea the temperature diminishes as we leave the surface of the water. In the two elements the same latitude unites, as it were, every climate, At unequal distances from the surface of the ocean, but in the same vertical plane, we find strata of air and strata of water of the same temperature. Hence, under the tropics, on the declivity of the Cordilleras, and in the abyss of the ocean, the plants of Lapland, as well as the marine animals in the vicinity of the pole, find the degree of heat necessary to their organic development.

From this order ofthings, established by nature,

we may conceive that, in a mountainous and extensive country like Mexico, the variety of indigenous productions must be immense, and that there hardly exists a plant in the rest of the globe which is not capable of being cultivated in some part of New Spain. Notwithstanding the laborious researches of three distinguished botanists, MM. Sesse, Mociño, and Cervantes, employed by the court in examining the vegetable riches of Mexico, we are far from yet being able to flatter ourselves that we know any thing like all the plants scattered over the insulated summits, or crowded together in the vast forests at the foot of the Cordilleras. If we still daily discover new herbaceous species on the central table-land, and even in the vicinity of the city of Mexico, how many arborescent plants have never yet been discovered by botanists in the humid and warm region along the eastern coast, from the province of Tabasco, and the fertile banks of the Guasacualco, to Colipa and Papantla, and along the western coast from the port of San Blas and Sonora to the plains of the province of Oaxaca ? Hitherto no species of quinquina (cinchona), none even of the small group, of which the stamina are longer than the corolla, which form the genus exostema, has been discovered in the equinoxial part of New Spain. It is probable, however, that this precious discovery will one day be made on the declivity of the Cordilleras, where arborescent

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ferns abound, and where the region of the true febrifuge quinquina with very short stamina and downy corollæ commences.

We do not propose here to describe the innumerable variety of vegetables with which nature has enriched the vast extent of New Spain, and of which the useful properties will become better known when civilization shall have made farther

*See my Geographie des Plantes, p. 61-66, and a memoir published by me in German, containing physical observations on the different species of cinchona growing in the two continents (Memoires de la Societé d'Histoire Naturelle de Berlin, 1807, No. 1 and 2). It is believed at Mexico, that the portlandia Mexicana, discovered by M. Sesse, might serve as a substitute for the quinquina of Loxa, as is done in a certain degree by the portlandia hexandra (Coutarea Aublet) at Cayenne, the Bonplaudia trifoliata Willd. or the cusparé on the banks of the Orinoco, and the switenia febrifuga Roxb. in the East Indies. It is to be desired that the medicinal virtues of the Pinkneya pubens of Michaux (mussaenda bracteolata Bartram) which grows in Georgia, and which has so much analogy with the cinchona, should also be examined. When we consider the properties of the Portlandia, Coutarea, and Bonplandia genera, or the natural affinity between the true prickly and creeping cinchona discovered at Guayaquil by M. Tafalla, and the pederia and danais genera, we perceive that the febrifuge principle of the quinquina is to be found in many other rubiaceous plants. In the same manner the caoutchouc is not only extracted from the hevea, but also from the urceola elastica, from the commiphora Madagascarensis, and from a great number of other plants of the euphorbean, of the urtican (ficus cecropia), of the cucurbitaceous (carica), and of the campanulaceous (lobelia) families.

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