custom of making their cochineals emigrate during the rainy season. As the Spaniard causes his flocks of merinos to emigrate on the approach of cold, so do these negroes send away their crop during a season which might prove fatal to them. The insects are packed in hampers, and carried as quickly as possible, on the backs of negroes, to a place nine leagues distant from the town, not so heavily visited with rain. Here they distribute them on the nopals, and keep them there till the month of October, when they return with their freight, and replace it in the nopaleries of Oaxaca. The plantations of cochineal cultivated by M. Thierry, at St. Domingo, were so successful that in 1789 there were more than four thousand plants in a single nopalerie, and the produce was ascertained by chemists to be quite equal to that of Mexico; but at the time of the French Revolution, the political troubles of St. Domingo caused the destruction of the plantations. Cochineal has been cultivated with some success in several of the British West India islands. Thus the Rev. L. Guilding, writing a few years ago to Dr. Hooker, says, “I possess a considerable nursery of this cactus, inhabited by thousands of the true _Coccus cacti_, and I do not despair of being able to send to the Society of Arts a large quantity of dried insects before the termination of the present year.” So important was the acquisition of this insect to the East India Company, that they offered a reward of six thousand pounds to any one who should introduce it into India, where hitherto the Company had only succeeded in procuring from Brazil the wild kind producing the _sylvestre_ cochineal, which is of inferior value. The true cochineal insect, and the cactus on which it feeds, are said to have been of late years successfully introduced into Spain and the French colony of Algiers, and now exist in the stores of the _Jardin des Plantes_ at Paris, and also in those of King Leopold at Claremont.