Two years after having been sown, the plant attains a height of three feet, and sends forth many branches, of which however but four or five are allowed to remain. The first fruits appear in the third year, but the tree does not come into full bearing before it is six or seven years old, and from that time forward it continues to yield abundant crops of beans during more than twenty years. When an Indian can get a few thousand cacao-trees planted, he passes an idle, quiet, contented life; all he has to do is to weed under the trees two or three times in the year, and to gather and dry the seeds in the sun. Cacao is chiefly used under the form of chocolate. The beans are roasted, finely ground, so as to convert them into a perfectly smooth paste, and improved in flavour by the addition of spices, such as the sweet-scented vanilla, a short notice of which will not be out of place. Like our parasitical ivy, the Vanilla aromatica, a native of torrid America, climbs the summits of the highest forest-trees, or creeps along the moist rock crevices on the banks of rivulets. The stalk, which is about as thick as a finger, bears at each joint a lanceolate and ribbed leaf, twelve inches long and three inches broad. The large flowers which fill the forest with their delicious odours, are white intermixed with stripes of red and yellow, and are succeeded by long and slender pods containing many seeds imbedded in a thick oily and balsamic pulp. These pods seldom ripen in the wild state, for the dainty monkey knows no greater delicacy, and his agility in climbing almost always enables him to anticipate man. At present the vanilla is cultivated not only in Mexico, but in Java, where the industrious Dutch have acclimatised it since 1819. It is planted under shady trees on a damp ground, and grows luxuriantly; but as a thousand blossoms on an average produce but one pod, it must always remain a rare and costly spice. Although but little known beyond the confines of its native country, Coca is beyond all doubt one of the most remarkable productions of the tropical zone. The sultry valleys on the eastern slopes of the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes are the seat of the Erythroxylon Coca, which, like the coffee-tree, bears a lustrous green foliage, and white blossoms ripening into small scarlet berries. The leaves when brittle enough to break on being bent, are stripped from the plant, dried in the sun, and closely packed in sacks. The naked shrub soon gets covered with new foliage, and after three or four months its leaves are ready for a second plucking, though in some of the higher mountain-valleys it can only be stripped once a year. Like the coffee-tree, the coca-shrub thrives only in a damp situation, under shelter from the sun; and for this reason maize, which rapidly shoots up, is generally sown between the rows of the young plants.