The vaynilla, a sweet name to those who love chocolate, is a creeping
plant which grows in moist places, and entwines itself with certain palm
trees, which serve it for a prop. It bears large leaves about a hand
long, and small white flowers. Like pulse, for fruit it bears little
hulls, or sheaths, a quarter of an ell long, triangular, and when ripe
dark on the surface, and of a bright colour; they have a most delicious
odour, and are full of very small seeds, like figs. Of these seeds the
Indian women make rosaries to adorn their necks with: the savages
formerly knew no other use of the vaynilla, which however birds and apes
eagerly devour. The little bag or sheath, in which the fruit is
inclosed, occasioned the Spaniards to give it the name of vaynilla. The
description of this plant, which became extremely profitable to the
Americans after the discovery of the use of chocolate, I owe to Father
Joseph Sanchez, who had travelled over the land of the Chiquitos, where
that fruit grows, as well as in Peru and elsewhere. For this plant grows
in no other part of Paraguay that I am acquainted with, which must be
attributed to the inhabitants, not to the climate, as it doubtless would
grow in the northern parts of Paraguay, were it cultivated there.