average annual export may probably not be
greater than the amount set down in the table of 1850, although,
in the previous year, about 30,000 peculs more were shipped.

Of the exports to the continent of Europe only a small proportion
goes to Spain, probably not exceeding a third part of the quantities
set down in the table for the continent.

Bremen, Hamburg, and Antwerp, are the three towns in the north
with which most business is done, and Bordeaux and Havre de Grace,
are nearly the only places to which the other exports are shipped
for Europe, exclusive of the ports of Cadiz, Malaga, and Bilboa,
in the Peninsula.

Having furnished the preceding tables of the amount of the exports
from the only outlet for foreign trade with the islands, excepting in
rice to China, as before mentioned, the reader may be able to form
some opinion of their veracity and value. And as it may be of some
service, I shall give a short sketch of each of the most important
of the articles there set down, premising it with a memorandum of the
weights and measures now in use through the islands. The pecul is equal
to 140 lbs. English, or 137 1/2 lbs. Spanish; the Spanish lb. being
two per cent. heavier than the standard British lb. The quintal is
102 lbs. English, and the arroba 25 1/2 lbs. English. The cavan is a
measure of the capacity of 5,998 cubic inches, and is subdivided into
25 quintas. The Spanish yard, or vara, is eight per cent. shorter
than the British yard, by which latter all the cotton and other
manufactures are sold by the merchants importing them, although the
shopkeepers who purchase them retail everything by the Spanish yard.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

It is not my intention, even were it in my power, which it is not,
to attempt an exact and complete description of all the productions
of the group of islands composing the Philippines, to which nature
has with no niggardly hand dispensed great territorial and maritime
wealth. And as the limits of this work prevent much expansion, I will
confine the following observations to an outline of the principal
articles produced in the country, beginning the catalogue with the
most important of them all, namely, rice.

The cultivation of paddy, or rice, here, as all over Asia, exercises
by far the greatest amount of agricultural labour, being their most
extensive article of cultivation, as it forms the usual food of the
people, and is, as the Spaniards truly call it, _El pau de lo