Of the exports to the continent of Europe only a small proportion goes to Spain, probably not exceeding a third part of the quantities set down in the table for the continent. Bremen, Hamburg, and Antwerp, are the three towns in the north with which most business is done, and Bordeaux and Havre de Grace, are nearly the only places to which the other exports are shipped for Europe, exclusive of the ports of Cadiz, Malaga, and Bilboa, in the Peninsula. Having furnished the preceding tables of the amount of the exports from the only outlet for foreign trade with the islands, excepting in rice to China, as before mentioned, the reader may be able to form some opinion of their veracity and value. And as it may be of some service, I shall give a short sketch of each of the most important of the articles there set down, premising it with a memorandum of the weights and measures now in use through the islands. The pecul is equal to 140 lbs. English, or 137 1/2 lbs. Spanish; the Spanish lb. being two per cent. heavier than the standard British lb. The quintal is 102 lbs. English, and the arroba 25 1/2 lbs. English. The cavan is a measure of the capacity of 5,998 cubic inches, and is subdivided into 25 quintas. The Spanish yard, or vara, is eight per cent. shorter than the British yard, by which latter all the cotton and other manufactures are sold by the merchants importing them, although the shopkeepers who purchase them retail everything by the Spanish yard. CHAPTER XXXIII. It is not my intention, even were it in my power, which it is not, to attempt an exact and complete description of all the productions of the group of islands composing the Philippines, to which nature has with no niggardly hand dispensed great territorial and maritime wealth. And as the limits of this work prevent much expansion, I will confine the following observations to an outline of the principal articles produced in the country, beginning the catalogue with the most important of them all, namely, rice. The cultivation of paddy, or rice, here, as all over Asia, exercises by far the greatest amount of agricultural labour, being their most extensive article of cultivation, as it forms the usual food of the people, and is, as the Spaniards truly call it, _El pau de los Indios_; a good or bad crop of it, influencing them just as much as potatoes do the Irish, or as the wheat crops do in bread-consuming countries. In September and October, when, in consequence of the heavy previous rains since the beginning of the wet season, the parched land is so buried as generally about that time to present the appearance of one vast marsh, it is ploughed lightly, after which the husbandman transplants the grain from the nurseries in which he had previously deposited it, in order to undergo there the first stages of vegetation.