PROD TI CE OP THE COPPER-TREE . 
479 
vated, trees will bear sixteen, eighteen, and even twenty 
pounds of coflee. In general, however, more than a pound 
and a halt or two pounds cannot be expected from each 
plant ; and even this is surerior to the mean produce of the 
West India Islands. The coffee trees sufi'er much from 
rain at the time of flowering, as well as from the want of 
water for artificial irrigation, and also from a parasitic plant, 
a new species of loranthus, which clings to the branches. 
When, in plantations of eighty or a hundred thousand 
shrubs, we consider the immense - quantity of organic matter 
contained in the pulpy berry of the coffee-tree, we may he 
astonished that no attempts have been made to extract a 
spirituous liquor from them.* 
If the troubles of St. Domingo, the temporary rise in the 
price of colonial produce, and the emigration of French 
planters, were the first causes of the establishment of coffee- 
plantations on the continent of America, in the island of 
Cuba, and in Jamaica; their produce has far more than 
compensated the deficiency of the exportation from the 
French \V est India Islands. This produce has augmented 
in proportion to the population, the change of customs, and 
the increasing luxury of the nations of Europe. The island 
* The beri ies heaped together produce a vinous fermentation, during 
which a very pleasant alcoholic smell is emitted. Placing, at Caracas, 
I he ripe fruit of the coffee-tree under an inverted jar, quite tided with 
water, and exposed to the rays of the sun, I remarked that uo extrication 
of gas took place in the first twenty-four hours. After thirty-six hours 
the berries became brown, and yielded gas. A thermometer, enclosed in 
the jar in contact with the fruit, kept at night 4° or 5° higher than the 
external air. In the space of eighty-seven hours, sixty berries, under 
various jars, yielded me from thirty, eight to forty cubic inches of a gas, 
which underwent no sensible diminution with nitrous gas. Though a 
great quantity of carbonic acid had been absorbed by the. water as it was 
produced, I still found 0-/8 in the forty inches. The remainder, or 0-22, 
was nitrogen. The carbonic arid hud not been formed by the absorption 
of the atmospheric oxygen. That which is evolved from the berries 
of the coffee-tree slightly moistened, and placed in a phial with a glass 
stopple filled with air, contains alcohol in suspension; like the foul air 
which is formed in our cellars during the fermentation of must. Ou 
agitating the gas in contact with water, the latter acquires a decidedly 
alcoholic flavour. How many substances are perhaps contained in a state 
of suspension in those mixtures of carbonic acid and hydrogen, which are 
called deleterious miasmata, and which rise everywhere within the tropics, 
in marshy grounds, on the sea-shore, and in forests where the soil is 
Strewed with lead leaves, rotten fruits, and putrefying insects. 
