Page:The Present State of Peru.djvu/110

84 The same alteration was observed in the vegetable productions transplanted in the new world. The wheat, sown with every precaution, was, in general, merely productive of a steril plant, provided with a stem of uncommon thickness. Its culture was therefore in many parts entirely abandoned. The vines did not prosper, although situated in more southern latitudes than in Europe. The coffee is still so inferior to that of Arabia, that even when mixed with Mocha coffee, it is readily detected, both by the taste and view, by the inhabitants of the Levant. It has not any sale in Turkey, unless at a very reduced price. The sugars of the Canaries, China, and Egypt, are decidedly preferred to those of Brazil, although the latter are esteemed the best in America.

Accordingly, the aquatic and succulent plants were those which throve in abundance, in a humid and marshy soil, covered with thick forests, and on that account well adapted to the propagation of the immense number of insects that tormented, at each step, the earliest settlers; since, the seeds of their fecundity being neither dispersed nor destroyed by the impulsion and agitation of the wind, which could not penetrate into those close retreats, they must have been most rapidly and prodigiously multiplied.

About three centuries of cultivation have partly remedied these defects. Constant labour, the cutting down of the trees and bushes, the drying up of the lakes, and the warmth of the habitations, have tempered the constitution of the air. The earth