The average yield per acre is between 200 and 300 pounds; but expert authority--Prof. O.F. Cook--in a statement made to the Committee on Insular Affairs of the United States House of Representatives, in 1900, held that under better cultural methods the yield could be increased to 800 or 900 pounds per acre. One estimator has calculated that an average plantation of 100 acres had cost its owner at the end of six or seven years, the bearing age, about $13,100 with yields of 75 pounds per acre in the third and in the fourth years, 400 pounds per acre in the fifth year, and 500 pounds in the sixth year, the income from which would practically have met the cost to that time. It is held by the same authority that an intensively cultivated, well-situated farm of selected trees, 880 to the acre, should yield some 880 pounds of cleaned coffee to the acre. COSTA RICA. Costa Rica ranks next to Guatemala and Salvador among the Central American countries as a producer of coffee, showing an average annual yield in recent years of 35,000,000 pounds as compared with Guatemala's 80,000,000 and Salvador's 75,000,000 pounds. Nicaragua has an average annual production of 30,000,000 pounds. Coffee was introduced into Costa Rica in the latter part of the eighteenth century; one authority saying that the plants were brought from Cuba in 1779 by a Spanish voyager, Navarro, and another saying that the first trees were planted several years later by Padre Carazo, a Spanish missionary coming from Jamaica. For more than a century six big coffee trees standing in a courtyard in the city of Cartago were pointed out to visitors as the very trees that Carazo had planted. The coffee-producing districts are principally on the Pacific slope and in the central plateaus of the interior. Plantations are located in the provinces of Cartago, Tres Rios, San Jose, Heredia, and Alajuela. In the province of Cartago are several extensive new estates on the slope to the Atlantic coast. The San Jose and the Cartago districts are considered by many to be the best naturally for the coffee tree. The soil is an exceedingly rich black loam made up of continuous layers of volcanic ashes and dust from three to fifteen feet deep. Preferable altitudes for plantations range from 3,000 to 4,500 feet, although a height of 5,000 feet is not out of use and there are some estates that do fairly well on levels as low as 1,500 feet. [Illustration: THE MODERN IDEA IN COFFEE CULTIVATION, COSTA RICA]