I have not dared—­for fear of prolixity—­to make this catalogue as complete as I could have done.  But it must be remembered that, over and above all this, every hedge and wood furnishes wild fruit more or less eatable; the high forests plenty of oily seeds, in which the tropic man delights; and woods, forests, and fields medicinal plants uncounted.  ’There is more medicine in the bush, and better, than in all the shops in Port of Spain,’ said a wise medical man to me; and to the Exhibition of 1862 Mr. M’Clintock alone contributed, from British Guiana, one hundred and forty species of barks used as medicine by the Indians.  There is therefore no fear that the tropical small farmer should suffer, either from want, or from monotony of food; and equally small fear lest, when his children have eaten themselves sick—­as they are likely to do if, like the Negro children, they are eating all day long—­he should be unable to find something in the hedge which will set them all right again.

At the amount of food which a man can get off this little patch I dare not guess.  Well says Humboldt, that an European lately arrived in the torrid zone is struck with nothing so much as the extreme smallness of the spots under cultivation round a cabin which contains a numerous family.  The plantains alone ought, according to Humboldt, to give one hundred and thirty-three times as much food as the same space of ground sown with wheat, and forty-four times as much as if it grew potatoes.  True, the plantain is by no means as nourishing as wheat:  which reduces the actual difference between their value per acre to twenty-five to one.  But under his plantains he can grow other vegetables.  He has no winter, and therefore some crop or other is always coming forward.  From whence it comes, that, as I just hinted, his wife and children seem to have always something to eat in their mouths, if it be only the berries and nuts which abound in every hedge and wood.  Neither dare I guess at the profit which he might make, and I hope will some day make, out of his land, if he would cultivate somewhat more for exportation, and not merely for home consumption.  If any one wishes to know more on this matter, let him consult the catalogue of contributions from British Guiana to the London Exhibition of 1862; especially the pages from lix. to lxviii. on the starch-producing plants of the West Indies.

Beyond the facts which I have given as to the plantain, I have no statistics of the amount of produce which is usually raised on a West Indian provision ground.  Nor would any be of use; for a glance shows that the limit of production has not been nearly reached.  Were the fork used instead of the hoe; were the weeds kept down; were the manure returned to the soil, instead of festering about everywhere in sun and rain:  in a word, were even as much done for the land as an English labourer does for his garden; still more, if as much were done for it as for a suburban market-garden, the produce might be doubled or trebled, and that without exhausting the soil.