sing, like the serpentine tube
used in ordinary stills, through the cooling vats, which so greatly
tends to correct the vices of a too quick evaporation. The tuba,
obtained in level and hot situations, is much more spirituous than
that produced in cold and shady places. In the first, six jars of
juice are sufficient to yield one of spirit, and in the latter,
as many as eight are requisite; a much greater number, however,
would be wanted to rectify this spirit so as to render it equal to
what is usually known by Hollands proof. I am not positively certain
what degree of strength the coco-brandy, or as it is usually called
coco-wine, possesses, but it is evidently inferior to the weakest made
in Spain from the juice of the grape. The only circumstance required
for it to be approved of, and received into the monopoly-stores,
is its being easily ignited by the application of a lighted candle.

[Nipa brandy.] The nipa is a small tree of the class of palms, which
grows in a very bushy form, and multiplies and prospers greatly on
the margins of rivers and watery tracts of land. The tuba, or juice,
is extracted from the tree whilst in its flowering state, in the same
way as that of the coco, and afterwards distilled by a similar process;
but it is more spirituous, from six to six and a half jars being
sufficient to yield one of wine. The great difference remarked in the
prices of these two species of liquor, arises out of the great number
of uses to which the fruit of the cocal or coco tree is applicable,
and the increase of expense and labor requisite to obtain the juice,
owing to the great height of the plant, and the frequent dangers to
which the caritones, or gatherers, are exposed in passing from one
tree to another, which they do by sliding along a simple cane (bamboo).

[Little drunkenness.] The impost on, or rather monopoly of, native
wine, is in itself little burdensome to the community, as it only
falls on the lower and most dissipated orders in society, and for this
reason it is not susceptible of the same increase as that of tobacco,
of which the use is more general, and now become an object of the
first necessity. The native of the Philippine Islands is, by nature,
so sober, that the spectacle of a drunken man is seldom noticed in
the streets; in the capital, where the most corrupt classes of them
reside, it is admirable to see the general abstinence from a vice
that degrades the human species. The consumption of