Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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In Many Parts Coffee And Cotton-Trees Progressively Take
Place Of The Cacao, Of Which The Lingering Harvests Weary The Patience
Of The Cultivator.
It is also asserted, that the new plantations of
cacao are less productive than the old; the trees do not acquire the
same vigour, and yield later and less abundant fruit.
The soil is
still said to be exhausted; but probably it is rather the atmosphere
that is changed by the progress of clearing and cultivation. The air
that reposes on a virgin soil covered with forests is loaded with
humidity and those gaseous mixtures that serve for the nutriment of
plants, and arise from the decomposition of organic substances. When a
country has been long subjected to cultivation, it is not the
proportions between the azote and oxygen that vary. The constituent
bases of the atmosphere remain unaltered; but it no longer contains,
in a state of suspension, those binary and ternary mixtures of carbon,
hydrogen, and nitrogen, which a virgin soil exhales, and which are
regarded as a source of fecundity. The air, purer and less charged
with miasmata and heterogeneous emanations, becomes at the same time
drier. The elasticity of the vapours undergoes a sensible diminution.
On land long cleared, and consequently little favourable to the
cultivation of the cacao-tree (as, for instance, in the West India
Islands), the fruit is almost as small as that of the wild cacao-tree.
It is on the banks of the Upper Orinoco, after having crossed the
Llanos, that we find the true country of the cacao-tree; thick
forests, in which, on a virgin soil, and surrounded by an atmosphere
continually humid, the trees furnish, from the fourth year, abundant
crops. Wherever the soil is not exhausted, the fruit has become by
cultivation larger and bitter, but also later.
On seeing the produce of cacao gradually diminish in Terra Firma, it
may be inquired, whether the consumption will diminish in the same
proportion in Spain, Italy, and the rest of Europe; or whether it be
not probable, that by the destruction of the cacao plantations, the
price will augment sufficiently to rouse anew the industry of the
cultivator. This latter opinion is generally admitted by those who
deplore, at Caracas, the diminution of so ancient and profitable a
branch of commerce. In proportion as civilization extends towards the
humid forests of the interior, the banks of the Orinoco and the
Amazon, or towards the valleys that furrow the eastern declivity of
the Andes, the new planters will find lands and an atmosphere equally
favourable to the culture of the cacao-tree.
The Spaniards, in general, dislike a mixture of vanilla with the
cacao, as irritating the nervous system; the fruit, therefore, of that
orchideous plant is entirely neglected in the province of Caracas,
though abundant crops of it might be gathered on the moist and
feverish coast between Porto Cabello and Ocumare; especially at
Turiamo, where the fruits of the Epidendrum vanilla attain the length
of eleven or twelve inches.
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