The temperate parts abound with all kinds of grain, beans, pease, melons, cucumbers, and European vegetables; asparagus is found wild, and there is a remarkably fine sort of vine, of which good and healthy wine is made, magueys, sugar-cane, maize, from which the Indians make their favourite drink; potatoes, a fruit resembling the almond, which produces an excellent oil; the European fruits; tobacco, and cinchona, or Jesuit's bark, sarsaparilla, rhubarb, jalap, sassafras, guiacum, dragon's blood, cupay, whose oil is used in medicine, nux vomica, vanilla, cacao, the timbabi, supplying a fine yellow gum, which is run into moulds, and formed into beads, necklaces, crosses, &c. Cedar, the curi or pine, from whose red knots, which contain a varnish, the Indians make images; the algarrobo, or carob tree, which is converted into bread, and the Paraguay tea or matté, a plant which rises about a foot and a half high, with slender branches, and leaves something like those of senna; of this there are two kinds, one called Paraguay, the other Caamina, or Yervacamini, which last sells for one-third more than the other. So useful is this western tea, that the mines would stand still, if the owners were to neglect to supply the workmen with it; and every person in Peru, Chili, and Buenos Ayres, consider themselves wretched, if not able to procure it; two millions of piastres worth of this herb, being sold from the province of Paraguay every year. It is infused and made nearly in the same way as Chinese tea, excepting that the branches are put in with the leaves, and that it is drank out of the vessel it is made in, through a silver or glass pipe, as soon as possible; as if it stays too long, it is supposed not to be good. The smell, and colour of this drink, is nearly as fine as that of the best Indian teas.