The Sweet Potato Flourishes On The Most Unpromising Lava, Where Soil Can Hardly Be Said To Exist, And In Good Localities Produces 200 Barrels To The Acre.

On dry light soils the Irish potato grows anyhow and anywhere, with no other trouble than that of planting the sets. Most vegetable dyes, drugs, and spices can be raised.

Forty diverse fruits present an overflowing cornucopia. The esculents of the temperate zones flourish. The coffee bush produces from three to five pounds of berries the third year after planting. The average yield of sugar is two and a half tons to the acre. Pineapples grow like weeds in some districts, and water melons are almost a drug. The bamboo is known to grow sixteen inches in a day. Wherever there is a sufficient rainfall, the earth teems with plenty.

Yet the Hawaiian Islands can hardly be regarded as a field for emigration, though nature is lavish, and the climate the most delicious and salubrious in the world. Farming, as we understand it, is unknown. The dearth of insectivorous birds seriously affects the cultivation of a soil naturally bounteous to excess. The narrow gorges in which terraced "patch cultivation," is so successful, offer no temptations to a man with the world before him. The larger areas require labour, and labour is not to be had. Though wheat and other cereals mature, attacks of weevil prevent their storage, and all the grain and flour consumed are imported from California.

Cacao, cinnamon, and allspice, are subject to an apparently ineradicable blight. The blight which has attacked the coffee shrub is so severe, that the larger plantations have been dug up, and coffee is now raised by patch culture, mainly among the guava scrub which fringes the forests. Oranges suffer from blight also, and some of the finest groves have been cut down. Cotton suffers from the ravages of a caterpillar. The mulberry tree, which, from its rapid growth, would be invaluable to silk growers, is covered with a black and white blight. Sheep are at present successful, but in some localities the spread of a pestilent "oat-burr" is depreciating the value of their wool. The forests, which are essential to the well-being of the islands, are disappearing in some quarters, owing to the attacks of a grub, as well as the ravages of cattle.

Cocoanuts, bananas, yams, sweet potatoes, kalo, and breadfruit, the staple food of the native population, are free from blight, and so are potatoes and rice. Beef cattle can be raised for almost nothing, and in some districts beef can be bought for the cent or two per pound which pays for the cutting up of the carcase. Every one can live abundantly, and without the "sweat of the brow," but few can make money, owing to the various forms of blight, the scarcity of labour, and the lack of a profitable market.

There is little healthy activity in any department of business. The whaling fleet has deserted the islands.

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