CLOUDBERRY

the delicious, round, soft, red or yellowish fruit—somewhat of raspberry style—abundantly borne on a creeping plant common in sub-aretic and arctic regions of hoth hemispheres, and found as far south as northern parts of New England, It is of high antiscorbutie value, both fresh and canned. CLOVES (see the color-page facing 348), widely used for flavoring de erts and confectionery, and medicinally, are the dried flower-buds of the clove-tree. As plucked, they are reddish, but this changes to the familiar dark brown in the proce of drvy ing, performed either by the smoke of wood fires or by exposure to the sun. They contain about 18% of their characteristic volatile oil. The tree, a handsome evergreen, grows to a height of forty feet, bears its developed clove buds in its seventh year, and gives two crops annually, increasing its productivene up to an age of nearly a hundred years. The clove industry was for many centuries confined to very narrow limits, <A few islands of the Molucea group furnished the world’s supply up to the beginning of the seventeenth century; then the Dutch, having driven the Portuguese out of the ‘Spice Islands,’’ tried to perfect their monopoly by destroying every clove-tree except those on the single Island of Amboyna. Later, the Island of Zanzibar became an important producer, but for a number of years following 1872 it was again unproductive as the result of a cyclone which uprooted nearly all of the mature fruit-bearing trees.: An interesting result of the cyclone was the release from the Dutch government warehouses at Amboyna of surplus cloves that had been accumulating there for generations—no sales having been permitted except when the bids reached the prices set by the government. The markings on some of the barrels received at that time in New York showed that they belonged to the surplus of crops reaching back nearly a century—some of the barrels were ready to fall to pieces, but the cloves were in excellent condition. _ The principal sources of supply today are the Islands of Zanzibar and Pemba (British East Africa) and the East Indies (both Dutch and British). The tree is also cultivated in the West Indies and other tropical regions. Oil of cloves is a convenient form for household purposes. See also the general article on Spicas.