CLOVES, the dried, unexpanded flower-buds of Eugenia aromatics, a tree belonging to the family Myrtaceae. The clove tree is a beautiful evergreen which grows to a height of 4o ft., having large oval leaves and crimson flowers in numerous groups of terminal clusters. The flower-buds are at first of a pale colour and gradually become green, after which they develop into a bright red, when they are ready for collecting. Cloves are rather more than half an inch in length, and consist of a long cylindrical calyx, terminating in four spreading sepals, and four unopened petals which form a small ball in the centre. The tree is a native of the Moluccas, or Spice islands; but it was long cultivated by the Dutch in Amboyna and two or three small neighbouring islands. Cloves were one of the principal Oriental spices that early excited the cupidity of Western commercial communities, having been the basis of a rich and lucrative trade from an early part of the Christian era. The Portuguese, by doubling the Cape of Good Hope, obtained possession of the principal portion of the clove trade, which they continued to hold for nearly a century when, in 1605, they were expelled from the Moluccas by the Dutch. Holland exerted great and inhuman efforts to obtain a complete monopoly of the trade, attempting to extirpate all the clove trees growing in their native islands, and to concentrate the whole production in the Amboyna islands. With great difficulty the French succeeded in introducing the clove tree into Mauritius in the year i770; subsequently the cultivation was introduced into Guiana, Brazil, most of the West Indian islands, and Zanzibar. The chief commercial sources of supply were for a long time Zanzibar and its neighbouring island Pemba on the East African coast, but the competition of Java and Sumatra is now severe and