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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The Soil Of
These Countries Is Sandy, Wherever It Is Not Marshy; But The Light
Lands Of The Tuamini And
Pimichin are extremely productive.* (* At
Javita, an extent of fifty feet square, planted with Jatropha manihot
(yucca) yields in two
Years, in the worst soil, a harvest of six
tortas of cassava: the same extent on a middling soil yields in
fourteen months a produce of nine tortas. In an excellent soil, around
clumps of mauritia, there is every year from fifty feet square a
produce of thirteen or fourteen tortas. A torta weighs three quarters
of a pound, and three tortas cost generally in the province of Caracas
one silver rial, or one-eighth of a piastre. These statements appear
to me to be of some importance, when we wish to compare the nutritive
matter which man can obtain from the same extent of soil, by covering
it, in different climates, with bread-trees, plantains, jatropha,
maize, potatoes, rice, and corn. The tardiness of the harvest of
jatropha has, I believe, a beneficial influence on the manners of the
natives, by fixing them to the soil, and compelling them to sojourn
long on the same spot.) Around the conucos of Pimichin grows, in its
wild state, the igua, a tree resembling the Caryocar nuciferum which
is cultivated in Dutch and French Guiana, and which, with the
almendron of Mariquita (Caryocar amygdaliferum), the juvia of the
Esmeralda (Bertholletia excelsa), and the Geoffroea of the Amazon,
yields the finest almonds of all South America.
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