In this country, the coffee tree bears its first crop when four or five years old. The trees are not subject to unusual hazards from the attacks of injurious insects and animals or from serious parasitic diseases. Nature is kind to them, and their only serious contention for existence arises from the luxuriant tropical vegetation by which they are surrounded. On the whole their cultivation is comparatively easy. On the best managed estates there are not more than 1,000 trees to a _fanegada_--about one and three-quarters acres of land--and it is calculated that an average annual yield for such a _fanegada_ should be about twenty quintals, a little more than 2,032 pounds of merchantable coffee. It is to be noted, however, that the average yield per tree throughout Venezuela is low--not more than four ounces. There are no great coffee belts as in Mexico and Central America. Many districts are days' rides apart. The plantations are isolated, and there is lacking a co-operative spirit among the growers. Methods of cultivating and preparing the berry for the market are substantially those that prevail elsewhere in South America. Most plantations are handled in ordinary, old-fashioned ways; but the better estates employ machinery and methods of the most advanced and improved character at all points of their operation, from the planting of the seed to the final marketing of the berry. JAVA. Java, the oldest coffee-producing country in which the tree is not indigenous, was producing a high-grade coffee long before Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela entered the industry; and it held its supremacy in the world's trade for many years before the younger American producing countries were able to surpass its annual output. The first attempt to introduce the plant into Java took place in 1696, the seedlings being brought from Malabar in India and planted at Kadawoeng, near Batavia. Earthquake and flood soon destroyed the plants; and in 1699 Henricus Zwaardecroon brought the second lot of seedlings from Malabar. These became the progenitors of all the _arabica_ coffees of the Dutch East Indies. The industry grew, and in 1711 the first Java coffee was sold at public auction in Amsterdam. Exports amounted to 116,587 pounds in 1720; and in 1724 the Amsterdam market sold 1,396,486 pounds of coffee from Java.