find the _lignum vitae_, hod-wood, calabash, locust, raintree, the West Indian birch, coccus-wood, the sidis-tree (called woman’s tongue), the Spanish elm, mahogany, cedar, and the crooked divi-divi. These are mostly timber trees. Among the fruits we find the mango, plum, nazeberry, star-apple, the banana and the orange. These are but names, and though I have not mentioned one tenth of the whole, I will spare you the rest. Jamaica is the land of wood and water, of rich forests and richer plains. You drive along a road which forms a natural arbour miles long, decked at every yard with clusters of flowers, and scented with all the sweetest perfumes of the universe. Then you break into flat plain land, and the fields on either side are a blaze of coloured ground plants; you find the mountain slope and drive along a narrow, precipitous road, and look down from an eerie height on to a deep valley clothed in greenery of the most luxuriant beauty. Fruit-trees are everywhere, oranges green or gold, bananas green or yellow, brown nazeberries, golden grape-fruit, custard apples, mangoes and plums. Then you pass a plantation of pine-apples, and come to the coffee district. It is the richest country in the world, par excellence--the flower and fruit gardens of the West. If you burn a patch of jungle and leave a charred acre of black earth, in two months you will return and find no trace of your destruction. Mother Earth quickly clothes her nakedness in this land of sunshine. If you plant a banana sprig and leave it alone for eight or nine months, you then find a seven or eight foot tree, and a heavy bunch of fruit ready for gathering. In West Africa they say that if you plant a rotten stick, a barren tree will grow to the height of twenty feet in twenty months, but if you plant a grain of corn nothing will appear. They might with justice say in Jamaica, that the grain of corn would produce a loaf, and the barren stick a lotus tree. Not only does this wealth of vegetation give to the island a most picturesque appearance, but also it constitutes a natural wealth which hitherto has been hardly sampled. The fruit-trees are beginning to be exploited, and already they support fleets of swift steamers between Port Antonio and America, and between Kingston and Bristol, and bring large profits to intelligent planters. But the exploitation of the timber forest has scarcely begun. The mahogany is exported in a small way, and valuable logwood finds its way into the holds of ocean-going steamers. Satin-wood is exported in a very small way, and there are large fortunes awaiting men who will develop this trade. Bamboo is valuable, and one occasionally sees a single negro despoiling a mighty clump of giant trees with a light hand chopper, but the trade in Jamaican timber is in its infancy.