The St. Johns herald., 1890-07-10
RRAzlL.s CHIEF PRo-ucT.
Introduction end Cu.Sa Vation of the Golf
 feo Plant south of the Amazon.

 Introduction and Cu.t4 vation of the Cof-
 fec Plant south of the Amazon.
 As soon as the Brazilian revolution broke out the coffee markets of New York, Baltimore, Havre and London were greatly agitated. Nothing was more natural, since it is known that Brazil alone produces more than half the coffee crop in the world. It has been said also, wrongly. or rightly, that the emancipation of the slaves, upon whom coffee cultivation mainly depended, had great deal to do with the revolution itself. It appears, fortunately, that neither the emancipation nor the revo- lution will exercise any harmful inhu- ence upon the productlon of the great staple of Brazil.
 Although the country was discovered 8s9 years ago, on April g, I5GO, by the Portuguese Admiral Pedro Alvarez Ca bral, more than 200 years elapsed before coffee was known in Brazil. The first trees were imported from Cayenne to Para, in 1727, by Major Pa3heta, who re- ceived them as a present from Mrs. Claude 'Orviliers, of the French colony in Guiana. Export duties prevented, however, extensive cultivation of the tree until the year 1761, when the ex- port duties were abolished. At the same time Chancellor Castello Branco brought to Rio Janeiro some coffee trees, which furnished the seed for the Fazendas, or plantations of Rezende and Sac Gonzalo, whence the cultivation spread in most districts of the province of Rio Janeiro, and after ward in the provinces of Sac Paulo and Minas Geraes. In TITO coffee was inn ported in the Maranhao, and the first trees in the province of Bahia grew from seed offered by the Capuchin friars of Rio to planter of Villa Vicosca. The great national product was created, and statistics have repeatedly furnished the figures attained in it's further develop ment. The number of coffee bags, something like six millions and a half yearly, is about the same as that of the cotton bales produced in the United States. One hundred and twenty y-eight years of the persistent work of Brazil has suficed to bring about such splen- did result, which can not be altered by political disturbances to any appreciable extent. That is made evident by re- view of the attention and great care necessary for coffee cultivation; and if this has been successful and progressive up to the present time, it has been due evidently to individual qualities, which Brazilians are not likely to lose in the future. The cultivation of coffee is not an easy matter. The soil is soon worn out and requires continuous attention in order to maintain it in good condition, inasmuch as fertilizers are not as yet in use and the only kind of manure or fer tilizing agent is found in the leaves of the tree.
 Another difficulty is that the plant begins to produce beans only when it is two or three years old. From the sixth year the crop keeps on steadily enlarg- ing, until the sixteenth year. From that time until it attains it's twenty fifth year the crop is good and bad al- ternately. Between the twenty-ffth and thirty-ffth year beans can be gath cred only at intervals varying from two to three years; after the thirty-ffth year a crop is given occasionally, but only by trees planted in frst-class ground. Coffee is cultivated with profit on hillsides, looking toward the rising sun, which are protected against the cold southern winds of that austral coun- try. Such grounds are to be found all over Brazil, and explains how coffee cultivation extends all over the new great American republic, from the Anna zon down to the southern boundary of the province of Sac Paulo, though the production is the most considerable in the provinces of Rio Janeiro, Minas Geraes and Sac Paulo.-N. Y. Tribune.