Upon the hillsides, in the remote land of China, there are thousands of acres of gardens filled with rows of plants, that look from a distance something like large gooseberry bushes, but which upon closer inspection more nearly resemble stunted japonica shrubs. Almost as soon as these shrubs have fully put forth their young leaves, men and women come round, and strip their twigs and branches bare. They then carry away the leaves, and dry them with much care, partly by exposure to the sunshine and air, and partly by the heat of fires of charcoal, until two-thirds of their weight have been steamed away. When the leaves are dried quickly, the shrunk and crisped foliage is of a green color. When they are left moist for a longer period, and are dried more slowly, they turn of a dull black hue. In either case, the crisped and curled leaves form the tea, portions of which are sent over the sea for the use of English tea-tables. The ground which is devoted to the growth of the tea plant, in China, would, if all joined together, form a farm nearly as large as Wales! Three millions and a half of acres are there covered with tea-bushes; and the entire produce of these acres in tea, is fifty times as large as the amount which is consumed in England. Fifty monster ships, like the Great Eastern, would not hold therefore the tea produce of a single year. Of tea, and of its allies, coffee and cocoa, the earth yields yearly not less than three thousand millions of pounds; a quantity which it would take a grocer a hundred years to weigh out, if he worked at the rate of a pound every second. More than half the inhabitants of the earth are daily engaged in the occupation of consuming this vast amount. Although these favorite beverages are now so extensively used, this has not been very long the case. In the year 1664 the East India Company made a present to the Queen of England of two pounds of tea, considering it a very rare and choice gift. The Chinese themselves do not seem to have drunk tea generally before the seventh century. Cocoa was brought from Mexico to Spain in the middle of the sixteenth century for the first time; and coffee was not seen in London until the seventeenth century. Hence it appears that these drinks are at least not actually necessary to human beings. The forefathers of the present generation did without them for centuries.