In marshy bushy places on this journey I saw many plants of the _Vanilla planifolia_, seldom bearing flowers, and more rarely producing fruit. It has now been satisfactorily determined, that this is the species from which the true Vanilla of commerce is procured. In Mexico it is extensively cultivated for the sake of its fruit, which it yields abundantly; while the plants which have been introduced into the East Indies, and the hot-houses of Europe, though they have frequently produced flowers, have very seldom perfected their fruit. Dr. Morren of Liège was the first to study attentively the natural history of this plant, and to prove experimentally that the fruit of the Vanilla may be as freely produced in our hot-houses as it is in Mexico. He has discovered that from some peculiarities in the reproductive organs of this plant, artificial fecundation is required. In the year 1836, a plant in one of the hot-houses in the botanic garden at Liège produced fifty-four flowers, which having been artificially fecundated, exhibited the same number of pods, quite equal to those imported from Mexico; and in 1837, a fresh crop of about a hundred pods was obtained upon another plant by the same method. He attributes the fecundation of the plant in Mexico to the action of some insect which frequents the flower; and hence accounts for the non-production of fruit in those plants, which have been removed to other countries. There can be no doubt that this plant is as perfectly indigenous to Brazil, as it is to Mexico; but it is no less certain that its fruit is there seldom matured. Is this also to be attributed to the absence of the means by which nature is supposed to effect fecundation in Mexico? This is a subject which, as Professor Morren justly observes, well deserves attention in a commercial point of view, since his experiments go to prove, that in all intertropical countries, vanilla might be cultivated, and a great abundance of fruit obtained.[9]