Such Trees As Are Rendered Fruitful By Grafting Offer Peculiar Advantages, As The Stocks Already Exist Upon Which Superior Varieties May Be Connected.

The principal food of the Cypriotes consists of olives, beans, bread, and onions; they seldom eat what we should call "cooked food;" whether this is owing to the scarcity of fuel, or whether it is natural in this climate to avoid flesh, I cannot determine:

Some say the people are too poor, and cannot afford mutton at twopence a pound, while at the same time they will not kill the oxen that are required for purposes of draught; they refuse the milk of cows, and only use that of sheep or goats. The fact remains that the country people seldom eat butcher's meat, but subsist upon olives, oil, bread, cheese, and vegetables.

Under these circumstances it would be natural to suppose that the accepted articles of consumption would be highly cultivated and superior in quality; but the reverse is the fact. The olive-oil is so inferior that foreign oil is imported from France for the use of the upper classes; the olives are of a poor description, and, as a rule, few vegetables are cultivated except in the immediate vicinity of town markets, the agricultural population or country people being too careless to excel in horticulture, and depending mainly upon the wild vegetables which the soil produces in abundance. If the people are too inert to improve the qualities and to extend the cultivation of vegetables, it is easy to comprehend their neglect of the tree-planting so necessary to the climatic requirements of this island.

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