In the valleys of Aragua, skirting the lake, both varieties of the sugar-cane are cultivated, viz., the common _Caña criolla_, and the species newly introduced from the South Sea, the _Caña de Otaheiti_. The latter variety is of a far lighter and more beautiful green, and a field of it may be distinguished from the common sugar-cane at a great distance. Cook and George Forster were the first to describe it; but it would appear, from Forster’s treatise on the edible plants of the South Sea Islands, that they were but little acquainted with the true value of this important product. Bougainville brought it to the Isle of France, whence it passed to Cayenne and (subsequently to the year 1792) to Martinique, Saint Domingo or Haiti, and many of the Lesser Antilles. The enterprising but unfortunate Captain Bligh transported it, together with the bread-fruit tree, to Jamaica. From Trinidad, an island contiguous to the continent, the new sugar-cane of the South Sea passed to the neighbouring coasts of Caracas. Here it has become of greater importance than the bread-fruit tree, which will probably never supersede so valuable and nutritious a plant as the banana. The Tahitian sugar-cane is more succulent than the common species, which is generally supposed to be a native of Eastern Asia. It likewise yields one-third more sugar on the same area than the _Caña criolla_, which is thinner in its stalk, and more crowded with joints. As, moreover, the West Indian Islands are beginning to suffer great scarcity of fuel (on the island of Cuba the sugar-pans are heated with orange-wood), the new plant acquires additional value from the fact of its yielding a thicker and more ligneous cane (_bagaso_). If the introduction of this new product had not been nearly simultaneous with the outbreak of the sanguinary Negro war in St. Domingo, the prices of sugar in Europe would have risen even higher than they did, owing to the interruption occasioned to agriculture and trade. The important question which here arises, whether the sugar-cane of Otaheiti, when removed from its indigenous soil, will not gradually degenerate and merge into the common sugar-cane, has been decided in the negative, from the experience hitherto obtained on this subject. In the island of Cuba a _caballeria_, that is to say, an area of 34,969 square toises (nearly 33 English acres), produces 870 cwt. of sugar, if it be planted with the Tahitian sugar-cane. It is remarkable enough that this important product of the South Sea Islands should be cultivated precisely in that portion of the Spanish colonies which is most remote from the South Sea. The voyage from the Peruvian shore to Otaheiti may be made in twenty-five days, and yet, at the period of my travels in Peru and Chili, the Tahitian sugar-cane was not yet known in those provinces. The natives of Easter Island, who suffer great distress