The diseases and breeding of different strains of tobacco are commercial factors of tremendous importance to the industry. With a yearly value of well over two billions of dollars, the crop is one of the most important plant products, outside of foods. The capital invested in America alone is over five hundred million dollars. 7. SPICES As we have seen many of our most valuable food plants are natives of and are now cultivated in temperate regions, but “sugar and spice and all things nice” mostly come from the tropics. What we usually know as spices such as nutmeg, vanilla, ginger, mace, cloves, allspice, and cinnamon are practically all confined to the tropical regions in or near the East Indies, only vanilla being of American origin. The trade in these spices has been for hundreds of years a practical monopoly in the hands of Dutch and British traders, and for hundreds of years before that the caravans from the Far East came laden with precious freight from the then mysterious country beyond the Mediterranean. VANILLA The long pods of two climbing orchids native in Central America and the West Indies furnished for many years our only supplies of this flavoring extract. But in 1891 a process of making vanilline chemically from sugar was perfected so that the vanilla trade is not what it was years ago. Vanilla planters, however, have been able to keep up the price of the plant product because of its unquestionable superiority over the manufactured article. But the latter has enormously increased the general use of vanilla, while the total plant output scarcely exceeds four hundred tons a year. Nearly all this is grown in the Old World tropics, as tropical America, where the plant is common enough as a forest orchid, has not greatly developed its culture.