is immense, second
only to the sago-palms. "The first sugar-canes planted with care on a
virgin soil, yield a harvest during twenty to twenty-five years, after
which they must be replanted every three years." In the island of
Cuba, instances are known of a sugar-plantation existing for
forty-five years. To procure new plants, the tedious process of sowing
seeds is not necessary. The practice is followed of taking cuttings,
and the stools, or scions, which spring from the joints (_nodi_) of
the old plant, are fit to be separated in fourteen days; these, in the
course of a year, are so well grown that they may be cut down, and
submitted to the sugar-mill. An English acre under culture for sugar,
in Java, yields 1285 pounds avoirdupois of refined sugar, and the
produce at Cuba is nearly the same.

Let not the thought arise, on the perusal of these statements, that
the gifts of Providence are distributed with partiality, as nothing
could be more unfounded. Independent of the destruction of the
plantations which tropical hurricanes so often occasion, an insect of
the locust kind, more particularly in the East Indies, produces such
fearful devastation as to realize the scene described by the prophet
Joel--"A fire devoureth before them, and behind them a flame burneth:
the land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a
desolate wilderness; yea, and nothing shall escape them[T]." From such
visitations, northern latitudes are generally exempt, and the constant
struggle which man has had to maintain with the elements and a
churlish soil, has so whetted his faculties as to render the return
for his labour not only more certain, but even more abundant[U].

As if to shew that "the earth full of the riches of the Lord," in
parts of the world where the low temperature is an obstacle to the
profitable cultivation of the sugar-cane, a substitute is found for it
in the _acer saccharinum_, or sugar-maple, which presents the great
peculiarity of the ascending sap being charged with sugar to such a
degree as to be then fit for the manufacture of this valuable
substance. There results from this circumstance a most important
advantage to the inhabitants of the northern regions, where this tree
grows, that the juice is extracted early in spring, a time when the
rigour of the season condemns the labourer to inactivity. Besides, the
sugar-maple grows spontaneously, and requires no care, till it is fit
for tapping; and when depriv