ualities. Its cultivation can be connected with no
difficulties; it needs only to plant the slips among trees, and to
keep them clear of weeds. It would prove therefore a great addition to
a cocoa plantation. In 1825 the price was, in Germany, sixty-six
dollars (equal to L9) per pound, and twenty-five to thirty dollars are
paid for it in Martinique.

Humboldt states that the annual value of vanilla exported from the
state of Vera Cruz was 40,000 dollars, L8,000 sterling. Some vanilla
is exported from Maranham. The cultivation of vanilla, which was
introduced into Java in the year 1847, is said to have made
considerable progress, there being now no fewer than thirty
plantations.

The fruit of this orchideous plant is entirely neglected in the
province of Caracas, though abundant crops of it might be gathered on
the humid coast between Porto Cabello and Ocumare, especially at
Turiamo, where the pods attain the length of nearly a foot. The
English and American merchants often seek to make purchases at the
port of La Guayra, but with difficulty procure it in small quantities.

In the valleys that descend from the chain of coast towards the
Caribbean sea, in the province of Truxillo, as well as in the mission
of Guiana, near the cataracts of the Orinoco, a great quantity of the
vanilla pods might be collected, the produce of which would be still
more abundant, if, according to the practice of the Mexicans, the
plant were disentangled from time to time from the other creepers,
with which it is intertwined and stifled.

When collected to prepare it for the market, about 12,000 of the pods
are strung like a garland by their lower end, as near as possible to
their foot-stalk; the whole are plunged for an instant into boiling
water to blanch them; they are then hung up in the open air and
exposed to the sun for a few hours. By some they are wrapped in
woollen cloths to sweat. Next day they are lightly smeared with oil,
by means of a feather or the fingers, and are surrounded with oiled
cotton to prevent the valves from opening. As they become dry, on
inverting their upper end they discharge a viscid liquor from it, and
they are pressed several times with oiled fingers to promote its flow.
The dried pods, like the berries of pepper, change color under the
drying operation, grow brown, wrinkled, soft, and shrink to one-fourth
of their original size. In this state they are touched a second time
with oil, but very sparingly, bec