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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To This
Circumstance No Doubt We Must Attribute The Apparent Anomalies
Sometimes Observed Within The Tropics, In The Lower Limit
Of corn.
We are astonished to see, eastward of the Havannah, in the famous
district of Quatro Villas, that this
Limit descends almost to the
level of the ocean; whilst west of the Havannah, on the slope of
the mountains of Mexico and Xalapa, at six hundred and
seventy-seven toises of height, the luxuriance of vegetation is
such, that wheat does not form ears. At the beginning of the
Spanish conquest, the corn of Europe was cultivated with success in
several regions now supposed to be too hot, or too damp, for this
branch of agriculture. The Spaniards on their first removal to
America were little accustomed to live on maize. They still adhered
to their European habits. They did not calculate whether corn would
be less profitable than coffee or cotton. They tried seeds of every
kind, making experiments the more boldly because their reasonings
were less founded on false theories. The province of Carthagena,
crossed by the chain of the mountains Maria and Guamoco, produced
wheat till the sixteenth century. In the province of Caracas, this
culture is of very ancient date in the mountainous lands of Tocuyo,
Quibor, and Barquisimeto, which connect the littoral chain with the
Sierra Nevada of Merida. Wheat is still successfully cultivated
there, and the environs of the town of Tocuyo alone export annually
more than eight thousand quintals of excellent flour.
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