Information respecting Scientific Travellers. 123 



Misantla, the centre of the vanilla trade, where we had reckoned on 

 being able to stop. 



" Misantla, as to corruption, need not envy the richest mining vil- 

 lages : vanilla has introduced the same demoralization there that the 

 precious metals have brought elsewhere. In all the forests of the 

 hot region where this plant grows, money has hardly any value, and 

 consequently all provisions are without a price. A man has only 

 to go into the woods, as one may say, to gather piastres. It is 

 astonishing to what a price this substance rises in the very place 

 where it is produced. Each pod (gousse) while yet green is paid for 

 at the rate of twelve to eighteen shillings by the first buyer, who then 

 sells it to the merchant at Papantla. A thousand of these pods or 

 capsules are packed together in leaden cases, which are afterwards co- 

 vered with cedar- wood and sent to Vera- Cruz. And what a differ- 

 ence between the price of vanilla and that of sarsaparilla ! Whilst 

 the former costs almost more where it grows than it does in Europe, 

 only three reals (ri5 franc of France) are paid for twenty-five 

 pounds of sarsaparilla ; and 1 80 pounds of this same drug only bring 

 the poor Indian the price for which a single pound is sold in Ger- 

 many ! Yet how much more difficult is it to turn up the earth ia 

 order to procure the long roots of this plant, which creep about in the 

 thickest parts of the woods, than to reach out the hand, and so at 

 once to gather fifty pods of vanilla, which each stalk of this orchi- 

 deous plant bears ! 



" Mexico is not so poor in species of palms as has hitherto been 

 supposed. That which particularly characterizes the warm region is 

 the Acrocomia spinosa, Martins, whose fruit serves as food for the 

 Indians. The cocoa-nut tree grows on the hill-sides, but I have not 

 yet met with it wild. Near the Laguna Verde I have found some 

 magnificent forests of Sabal mexicanum, Martins, with trunks forty 

 feet high and as hard as those of our fir-trees. These forests are very 

 picturesque, and especially remarkable from no other kind of tree 

 being mixed with the palms. In the virgin woods over the whole 

 extent of coast we found a magnificent palm, which they here call 

 the Palma real. The petioles are nearly fifty feet long ; they are 

 extremely hard and have four or five angles ; the folioles are linear, 

 ranged in two rows ; the trunk is excellent timber ; the fruit, which 

 is as large as a plum, serves as food for cattle. In the mountain 

 forests the species of Chamcedorea prevail, with lank slender stalks 

 and only from four to ten feet high. Along the wild path which leads 

 across the almost impenetrable virgin forests to the village of Xical- 

 tepec, there grows a remarkable new palm, with a stem of a finger's 

 thickness, from ten to twelve feet high, the wood black and exces- 

 sively hard ; the petioles are six feet long, and it is quite covered 

 with sharp black thorns two inches long. We gathered several new 

 Cycadece. Another family which promises some fine discoveries is 

 that of the AroidecE ; they occupy a very prominent part in the phy- 

 siognomy of the virgin woods ; all the trunks of trees are clothed with 

 them. Above all, we find some new and gigantic species of Caladium 

 with petioles three feet long, bearing leaves which are sometimes 



