_Sugar-cane._—Arranging the products to be described, not in a scientific order, but in that sequence which their commercial importance seems to suit, sugar-cane easily leads; and this in spite of the difficulties of the labor supply, which I deem of more importance than the artificial competition of the very inferior sugar-beet. It is a bold assertion that no country or climate is better suited to the culture of sugar-cane. I have watched the growth of four of the choicest varieties[52] of cane side by side with that usually cultivated on the Atlantic coast (Bourbon), compared this with the growth of cane in Louisiana, the West Indies, Guiana, the Hawaiian Islands, India, the East Indies, Egypt, and the Mauritius, and I have ascertained the cost of cultivation, expense of living, yield and freight of product to market, in all these various centres of sugar-production, in a much more elaborate way than would be in place to record in this book. [Illustration: A Primitive Sugar-mill.] At present the sugar-plantations of any importance are on the Pacific side of Guatemala, although some, as that of San Geronimo, near Salamà, are in the high interior. The valley of the Michatoya is full of small plantations, or _ingenios_. From the Pacific ports was exported in 1883, 44,927.27 cwt. of sugar, valued at $223,136.35; in 1884. about 7,000 cwt. less. The home consumption of sugar is very great, and most of that raised in the Department of Chiquimula is not exported. Much of the manufacture is by the rudest wooden mills, and the sugar resembles the poorest quality of maple-sugar; it is cooled in wooden blocks in hemispherical form, and comes to market wrapped in corn husks, when it is called _panela_. That the sugar production may be better understood, I give the statistics for 1883, as published by the Government. A _finca_ is a plantation; a _manzana_ equals an acre and three quarters, more or less; an _arroba_ weighs twenty-five pounds, and a _quintal_ one hundred pounds.