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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As an aliment it contains a
large quantity of nutritive and stimulating particles in a small
compass.
It has been said with truth, that in the East, rice, gum, and
ghee (clarified butter), assist man in crossing the deserts; and so,
in the New World, chocolate and the flour of maize, have rendered
accessible to the traveller the table-lands of the Andes, and vast
uninhabited forests.
The cacao harvest is extremely variable. The tree vegetates with such
vigour that flowers spring out even from the roots, wherever the earth
leaves them uncovered. It suffers from the north-east winds, even when
they lower the temperature only a few degrees. The heavy showers that
fall irregularly after the rainy season, during the winter months,
from December to March, are also very hurtful to the cacao-tree. The
proprietor of a plantation of fifty thousand trees often loses the
value of more than four or five thousand piastres in cacao in one
hour. Great humidity is favourable to the tree only when it augments
progressively, and is for a long time uninterrupted. If, in the season
of drought, the leaves and the young fruit be wetted by a violent
shower, the fruit falls from the stem; for it appears that the vessels
which absorb water break from being rendered turgid. Besides, the
cacao-harvest is one of the most uncertain, on account of the fatal
effects of inclement seasons, and the great number of worms, insects,
birds, and quadrupeds,* (* Parrots, monkeys, agoutis, squirrels, and
stags.) which devour the pod of the cacao-tree; and this branch of
agriculture has the disadvantage of obliging the new planter to wait
eight or ten years for the fruit of his labours, and of yielding after
all an article of very difficult preservation.
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