the chief stem has been removed, they are kept as a kind of coppice, and not allowed to rise higher than ten feet. Nutmegs and cloves, the costly productions of the remotest isles of the Indian Ocean, were known in Europe for centuries before the countries where they grow had ever been heard of. Arabian navigators brought them to Egypt, where they were purchased by the Venetians, and sold at an enormous profit to the nations of the West. But, as is well known, the commercial grandeur of the City of the Lagunes was suddenly eclipsed after Vasco de Grama discovered the new maritime road to the East Indies, round the Cape of Good Hope (1498); and when, a few years later, the countrymen of the great navigator conquered the Moluccas (1511), they for a short time monopolised the whole spice trade much more than their predecessors had ever done before. But here also, as in Ceylon, the Portuguese were soon obliged to yield to a stronger rival; for the Dutch now appeared upon the scene, and by dint of enterprise and courage soon made themselves masters of the Indian Ocean. In 1605 they drove the Portuguese from Amboyna, and before 1621 had elapsed the whole of the Moluccas were in their possession. Five-and-twenty years later, Ceylon also fell into their hands, and thus they became the sole purveyors of Europe with cinnamon, cloves, and nutmegs. Unfortunately, the scandalous manner in which they misused their power throws a dark shade over their exploits. For the better to secure the monopoly of the spice trade, they declared war against nature itself, allowed the trees to grow only in particular places, and extirpated them everywhere else. Thus the planting of the nutmeg tree was confined to the small islands of Banda, Lonthoir, and Pulo Aij, and that of the clove to Amboyna. Wherever the trees were seen to grow in a wild state they were unsparingly rooted up, and the remainder of the Moluccas were occupied and subjugated for no other reason. The natives were treated with unmerciful cruelty, and blood flowed in torrents to keep up the prices of cloves and nutmegs at an usurious height. When the spices accumulated in too large a quantity for the market, they were thrown into the sea or destroyed by fire. Thus M. Beaumare, a French traveller, relates that on June 10, 1760, he beheld near the Admiralty at Amsterdam a blazing pile of cinnamons and cloves, valued at four millions of florins, and an equal quantity was to be burnt the next day. The air was perfumed with their delicious fragrance, the essential oils freed from their confinement distilled over, mixing in one spicy stream, which flowed at the feet of the spectators; but no one was suffered to collect any of this, or, on pain of heavy punishment, to rescue the smallest quantity of the spice from the flames.