Such Are The Changes Which A Few Years Have Produced, And Which Are Proceeding With Increasing Rapidity.

They are the effects of knowledge and of long-restrained activity; and they render less striking the contrast in manners and civilization which I observed at the beginning of the century, at Caracas, Bogota, Quito, Lima, Mexico and the Havannah.

The influences of the Basque, Catalanian, Galician and Andalusian origin become every day more imperceptible.

The island of Cuba does not possess those great and magnificent establishments the foundation of which is of very remote date in Mexico; but the Havannah can boast of institutions which the patriotism of the inhabitants, animated by a happy rivalry between the different centres of American civilization, will know how to extend and improve whenever political circumstances and confidence in the preservation of internal tranquillity may permit. The Patriotic Society of the Havannah (established in 1793); those of Santo Espiritu, Puerto Principe, and Trinidad, which depend on it; the university, with its chairs of theology, jurisprudence, medicine and mathematics, established since 1728, in the convent of the Padres Predicedores;* (* The clergy of the island of Cuba is neither numerous nor rich, if we except the Bishop of the Havannah and the Archbishop of Cuba, the former of whom has 110,000 piastres, and the latter 40,000 piastres per annum. The canons have 3000 piastres. The number of ecclesiastics does not exceed 1100, according to the official enumeration in my possession.) the chair of political economy, founded in 1818; that of agricultural botany; the museum and the school of descriptive anatomy, due to the enlightened zeal of Don Alexander Ramirez; the public library, the free school of drawing and painting; the national school; the Lancastrian schools, and the botanic garden, are institutions partly new, and partly old. Some stand in need of progressive amelioration, others require a total reform to place them in harmony with the spirit of the age and the wants of society.

AGRICULTURE.

When the Spaniards began their settlements in the islands and on the continent of America those productions of the soil chiefly cultivated were, as in Europe, the plants that serve to nourish man. This primitive stage of the agricultural life of nations has been preserved till the present time in Mexico, in Peru, in the cold and temperate regions of Cundinamarca, in short, wherever the domination of the whites comprehends a vast extent of territory. The alimentary plants, bananas, manioc, maize, the cereals of Europe, potatoes and quinoa, have continued to be, at different heights above the level of the sea, the basis of continental agriculture within the tropics. Indigo, cotton, coffee and sugar-cane appear in those regions only in intercalated groups. Cuba and the other islands of the archipelago of the Antilles presented during the space of two centuries and a half a uniform aspect: the same plants were cultivated which had nourished the half-wild natives and the vast savannahs of the great islands were peopled with numerous herds of cattle. Piedro de Atienza planted the first sugar-canes in Saint Domingo about the year 1520; and cylindrical presses, moved by water-wheels, were constructed.* (* On the trapiches or molinos de agua of the sixteenth century see Oviedo, Hist. nat. des Ind. lib. 4 cap. 8.) But the island of Cuba participated little in these efforts of rising industry; and what is very remarkable, in 1553, the historians of the Conquest* mention no exportation of sugar except that of Mexican sugar for Spain and Peru. (* Lopez de Gomara, Conquista de Mexico (Medina del Campo 1353) fol. 129.) Far from throwing into commerce what we now call colonial produce, the Havannah, till the eighteenth century, exported only skins and leather. The rearing of cattle was succeeded by the cultivation of tobacco and the rearing of bees, of which the first hives (colmenares) were brought from the Floridas. Wax and tobacco soon became more important objects of commerce than leather, but were shortly superseded in their turn by the sugar-cane and coffee. The cultivation of these productions did not exclude more ancient cultivation; and, in the different phases of agricultural industry, notwithstanding the general tendency to make the coffee plantations predominate, the sugar-houses furnish the greatest amount in the annual profits. The exportation of tobacco, coffee, sugar and wax, by lawful and illicit means, amounts to fourteen millions of piastres, according to the actual price of those articles.

Three qualities of sugar are distinguished in the island of Cuba, according to the degree of purity attained by refining (grados de purga). In every loaf or reversed cone the upper part yields the white sugar; the middle part the yellow sugar, or quebrado; and the lower part, or point of the cone, the cucurucho. All the sugar of Cuba is consequently refined; a very small quantity is introduced of coarse or muscovado sugar (by corruption, azucar mascabado). The forms being of a different size, the loaves (panes) differ also in weight. They generally weigh an arroba after refining. The refiners (maestros de azucar) endeavour to make every loaf of sugar yield five-ninths of white, three-ninths of quebrado, and one-ninth of cucurucho. The price of white sugar is higher when sold alone than in the sale called surtido, in which three-fifths of white sugar and two-fifths of quebrado are combined in the same lot. In the latter case the difference of the price is generally four reals (reales de plata); in the former, it rises to six or seven reals. The revolution of Saint Domingo, the prohibitions dictated by the Continental System of Napoleon, the enormous consumption of sugar in England and the United States, the progress of cultivation in Cuba, Brazil, Demerara, the Mauritius and Java, have occasioned great fluctuations of price. In an interval of twelve years it was from three to seven reals in 1807, and from twenty-four to twenty-eight reals in 1818, which proves fluctuations in the relation of one to five.

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