GROWING INTEREST IN THE COUNTRY AND ITS INDUSTRIES.

During 10 seasons spent in the peninsula of Florida the writer received many inquiries, by letter, from men all over the United States, asking for data on beekeeping and citrus-growing in Florida. And the publishers of this little handbook state that they are daily receiving an increasingly large number of similar letters from those who desire to visit the country or to become permanent dwellers there. It is the hope that this little pamphlet may give the information desired, that its composition has been undertaken.

SOILS.

The soils of Florida seem especially adapted to the orange and grape fruit, not quite so well to the lemon and lime. The Spanish explorers, doubtless, first dropped the seed, that later grew and flourished there; for the earliest colonists from the States to the north found large groves of wild oranges all over the State, the so-called “sour oranges’’ and the less acrid “Bitter Sweets.’’ In the hammock (hummock) lands, where the black soil is rich in humus and the moisture abundant, many wild-orange groves are growing at the present time. The sudden gleam of gold from a heavily laden wild-orange tree, growing amid a tangle of vines, live-oaks and palmettoes, is no uncommon sighh to the hunter or