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 Exportation From
That Port Amounts Only To Sixty Thousand Fanegas; Consequently It Is
Two-Thirds Less Than That Of The Ports Of The Capitania-General Of
Caracas.
Though the plantations of cacao have augmented in the provinces of
Cumana, Barcelona, and Maracaybo, in proportion as they have
diminished in the province of Caracas, it is still believed that, in
general, this ancient branch of agricultural industry gradually
declines.
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.
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