Alluvial flats bordering the sea, and watered by streams from the mountains, are over-grown with a wild, scrub guava-bush, introduced by foreigners, and which spreads with such fatal rapidity that the natives, standing still while it grows, anticipate its covering the entire island.

Even tracts of clear land, which, with so little pains, might be made to wave with orchards, lie wholly neglected.
When I considered their unequalled soil and climate, thus unaccountably slighted, I often turned in amazement upon the natives about Papeetee; some of whom all but starve in their gardens run to waste.

Upon other islands which I have visited, of similar fertility, and wholly unreclaimed from their first-discovered condition, no spectacle of this sort was presented.
The high estimation in which many of their fruit-trees are held by the Tahitians and Imeeose--their beauty in the landscape--their manifold uses, and the facility with which they are propagated, are considerations which render the remissness alluded to still more unaccountable.

The cocoa-palm is as an example; a tree by far the most important production of Nature in the Tropics.

To the Polynesians it is emphatically the Tree of Life; transcending even the bread-fruit in the multifarious uses to which it is applied.
Its very aspect is imposing.