AOEICULTUEB IN CUBA. 247 



productions of the soil chiefly cultivated were, as in Europe, 

 the plants that serve to nourish man. This primitive stage 

 of the agricultural life of nations, has been preserved till the 

 present time in Mexico, in Peru, in the cold and temperate 

 regions of Cundinamarca, in short, wherever the domination 

 of the whites comprehends a vast extent of territory. The 

 alimentary plants, bananas, manioc, maize, the cereals of 

 Europe, potatoes, and quinoa, have continued to be, at diffe- 

 rent heights above the level of the sea, the basis of conti- 

 nental agriculture within the tropics. Indigo, cotton, 

 coffee, and sugar-cane, appear in those regions only in inter- 

 calated groups. Cuba, and the other islands of the archi- 

 pelago of the Antilles, presented during the space of two 

 centuries and a half, a uniform aspect : the same plants were 

 cultivated which had nourished the half-wild natives, and 

 the vast savannahs of the great islands were peopled with 

 numerous herds of cattle. Pieclro de Atienza planted the 

 first sugar-canes in Saint Domingo, about the year 1520; 

 and cylindrical presses, moved by water-wheels, were con- 

 structed.* But the island of Cuba participated little in these 

 efforts of rising industry ; and what is very remarkable, in 

 1553, the historians of the Conquestf mention no expor- 

 tation of sugar except that of Mexican sugar for Spain and 

 Peru. Far from throwing into commerce what we now call 

 colonial produce, the Ilavannah, till the eighteenth century, 

 exported only skins and leather. The rearing of cattle 

 was succeeded by the cultivation of tobacco and the rearing 

 of bees, of which the first hives (colmenares) were brought 

 from the Floridas. "Wax and tobacco soon became more 

 important objects of commerce than leather, but were shortly 

 superseded in their turn by the sugar-cane and coffee. The 

 cultivation of these productions did not exclude more ancient 

 cultivation ; and, in the different phases of agricultural 

 industry, notwithstanding the general tendency to make 

 the coffee plantations predominate, the sugar-houses fur- 

 nish the greatest amount in the annual profits. The 

 exportation of tobacco, coffee, sugar, and wax, by lawful and 



* On the trapichea or molinos de agua of the sixteenth century, see 

 Oviedo, ///*/. nat. de Ind., lib. 4, cap. 8. 



f Lopez de Gomara, Conquista de Mexico (Medina del Campo, 1353), 

 fol. 129. 



