An acre of
favourably situated land will grow a thousand stems of bananas,
which will produce annually ten tons of fruit. The sweet potato
flourishes on the most unpromising lava, where soil can hardly be
said to exist, and in good localities produces 200 barrels to the
acre. On dry light soils the Irish potato grows anyhow and
anywhere, with no other trouble than that of planting the sets.
Most vegetable dyes, drugs, and spices can be raised. Forty diverse
fruits present an overflowing cornucopia. The esculents of the
temperate zones flourish. The coffee bush produces from three to
five pounds of berries the third year after planting. The average
yield of sugar is two and a half tons to the acre. Pineapples grow
like weeds in some districts, and water melons are almost a drug.
The bamboo is known to grow sixteen inches in a day. Wherever there
is a sufficient rainfall, the earth teems with plenty.
Yet the Hawaiian Islands can hardly be regarded as a field for
emigration, though nature is lavish, and the climate the most
delicious and salubrious in the world. Farming, as we understand
it, is unknown. The dearth of insectivorous birds seriously affects
the cultivation of a soil naturally bounteous to excess.
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