Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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Excepting The Interior Of The
Island Of Cuba,* (* The District Of Quatro Villas.) We Scarcely
Find Elsewhere In The Equinoctial Regions European Corn Cultivated
In Large Quantities In So Low A Region.
The fine fields of wheat in
Mexico are between six hundred and twelve hundred toises of
absolute elevation; and it is rare to see them descend to four
hundred toises.
We shall soon perceive that the produce of grain
augments sensibly, from high latitudes towards the equator, with
the mean temperature of the climate, in comparing spots of
different elevations. The success of agriculture depends on the
dryness of the air; on the rains distributed through different
seasons, or accumulated in one season; on winds blowing constantly
from the east; or bringing the cold air of the north into very low
latitudes, as in the gulf of Mexico; on mists, which for whole
months diminish the intensity of the solar rays; in short, on a
thousand local circumstances which have less influence on the mean
temperature of the whole year than on the distribution of the same
quantity of heat through the different parts of the year. It is a
striking spectacle to see the grain of Europe cultivated from the
equator as far as Lapland in the latitude of 69 degrees, in regions
where the mean heat is from 22 to-2 degrees, in every place where
the temperature of summer is above 9 or 10 degrees. We know the
minimum of heat requisite to ripen wheat, barley, and oats; but we
are less certain in respect to the maximum which these species of
grain, accommodating as they are, can support. We are even ignorant
of all the circumstances which favour the culture of corn within
the tropics at very small heights. La Victoria and the neighbouring
village of San Mateo yield an annual produce of four thousand
quintals of wheat. It is sown in the month of December, and the
harvest is reaped on the seventieth or seventy-fifth day. The grain
is large, white, and abounding in gluten; its pellicle is thinner
and not so hard as that of the wheat of the very cold table-lands
of Mexico. An acre* (* An arpent des eaux et forets, or legal acre
of France, of which 1.95 = 1 hectare. It is about 1 1/4 acre
English.) near Victoria generally yields from three thousand to
three thousand two hundred pounds weight of wheat. The average
produce is consequently here, as at Buenos Ayres, three or four
times as much as that of northern countries. Nearly sixteenfold of
the quantity of seed is reaped; while, according to Lavoisier, the
surface of France yields on an average only five or six for one, or
from one thousand to twelve hundred pounds per acre.
Notwithstanding this fecundity of the soil, and this happy
influence of the climate, the culture of the sugar-cane is more
productive in the valleys of Aragua than that of corn.
La Victoria is traversed by the little river Calanchas, running,
not into the Tuy, but into the Rio Aragua:
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