The rock is near the surface when it does not protrude and is soft, nutritious to plants, and otherwise valuable and useful. “What will grow there?” Every thing that I see about me in this hall except discontent! (The platform on which the gentleman stood was covered with various fruits: oranges, lemons, limes, citrons, bananas, and many varieties of vegetables.) This looks like home. I see familiar things, but _miss_ more than I recognize! I think I must yield the palm to you in oranges, but in all other varieties of _citrus_, you must take a back seat. Our guava is a royal heritage, only we have not yet found how to market them. We have about twenty varieties and thousands upon thousands of bearing trees. The fruit delicious to a cultivated taste fresh from the tree, while every housewife in the land, and every lover of sweets, can descant with eloquence upon the marmalades and jellies made of this desirable fruit. The tree is hardy with us, and will take care of and propagate itself, and is on terms of great cordiality with our rocky plantations. It should bear in three years. Ours is the natural country of the lime, lemon and citron; children of a common stock. We have several varieties of the lime. The trees are of rapid growth, constant bearers, very prolific, subject to no disease, and very tenacious of life. The fruit is large, “How large?” as a Sicily lemon. I consider the lime as profitable as the orange, and more so, with us. It should be cultivated for _citric acid_, of which it yields more than any other fruit. The time will come when our part of Florida will supply citric acid to the world. A peck of limes will yield a gallon of juice; one and a half gallons of juice should produce one pound of citric acid, which in the markets of the world should bring $1.25 in gold. * * * Lime trees will bear in three years and can be planted as thick as blackberry bushes, but to cultivate them, they should be eight to ten feet apart. Too much attention can not be given to this matter. Citric acid is a commodity always, everywhere, and increasingly in demand. The lime belt is narrow and limited. Ours is the most productive in the world. The limes are larger than those of any other country and the percentage of acid is perceptibly greater. Fortunes await in this department of industry alone, and the outlay of money to get a start is insignificant compared to the planting of an orange grove. Ours is the country of the palm and the cocoanut. The tree grows with us enormously and bears continuously. They are meat and drink in a thirsty land. Then we have the _mango_ and _maumee apple_, fruits one soon becomes familiar with, after which, intimacy is never interrupted. But the _sugar apple_ is, from my point of view and experience, the choicest of all. There is nothing comparable to it. “Exquisite” is a nice word, and orange, mango, maumee, avocado pear, pine-apple, banana, are names, the bare mention of which sets