A coffee plantation in Brazil. The ripe red berries are picked and put into bags. They are then carted to the pulping mill, which crushes the berry and removes the beans.
A stalk and root of the manioc plant. These thick roots are dried and made into flour, which forms the chief food of many people in warm countries.
The fibers of the leaves, some of which are forty or fifty feet long, he twists into ropes or makes into hammocks and fishing-nets. With the leaves themselves he makes a roof and a door for his hut; from the bark he makes his canoe. The wax palm supplies him with candles.
India rubber, which has so many uses, comes chiefly from the Selvas of Brazil. It is the sap of the India rubber tree.
Man'-i-oc, or cassava, supplies the natives with a coarse kind of bread.
The root is dried and ground into meal. When needed for use it is mixed with water and baked.
Tapioca is made from manioc flour by separating the starch from it. Part of the starch is turned into sugar and forms in little lumps, or masses, which we call tapioca.
Quinine, so much used for the cure of fever, is made from the bark of a tree called cinchona (sin-ko'-nah), which grows on the slopes of the Andes. The Indians taught Europeans the use of the bark. When sick with fever they used to drink water from pools in which the boughs or dead trunks of cinchona trees had been lying.
6. The cultivated products are such as belong to the Torrid and Temperate zones. As in Mexico, so here we find that different crops are raised according as the farms are among the mountains or in the lowlands.
Among the mountains and in the southern part of the continent, wheat and other products of the Temperate zone are cultivated.
In the lowlands sugarcane, corn, cotton, cacao and coffee trees, manioc, pineapples, and bananas grow in profusion.
The banana supplies thousands of the people with their daily bread. When green, it is used as a vegetable; when ripe, it is eaten as fruit, or dried and grated into flour.
 |
 |
| A branch of the coffee tree, showing the way the leaves and berries are arranged on the stalk. | The pods, or gourds, of the cacao or chocolate tree. Each pod contains about two dozen dark-colored seeds. These seeds are dried in the sun much in the same way as coffee. |
Maté (mah'tay), or Paraguay tea (pah-rah-gway'), is widely used by the people of South America. It is the leaf of a tree which is something like our holly.
The coffee which we use comes chiefly from Brazil. That country produces more than one-half of all that is raised in the world.
Drying coffee in Brazil. After the beans are washed out of the pulp, they are exposed to the sun for about a week by being spread out upon hard smooth ground. They must not be exposed to the rain or dew.
Coffee is the seed of a beautiful shrub with dark, glossy leaves, white flowers, and scarlet fruit. The fruit, when ripe, is crushed to separate the seeds from the soft parts. The seeds are
