Bounty of the Sun

For ages upon ages, the sun burned down upon this place, this unplanned Eden, this spawning ground for time. Mark the richness here, the lush fruit of sun and rain, of microscopic nourishment, and the bounty that the long, dead, pay to living things.

So it must have looked in the beginning, in the morning of the world. The select must have looked to the first man who wandered into this place, the taste of this bounty of the sun to give it all a meaning and a name.

The National Broadcasting Company in cooperation with the Alfred T. Sloan Foundation presents Bounty of the Sun, the story of the citrus industry in Florida, and of a 20th century discovery of a fountain of youth.

This is the fifth in a series heritage over the land, documenting what we believe to be one of the most remarkable developments of our time, the rebirth of the American South. A short time ago, Henry Cassidy, a distinguished foreign correspondent, led an NBC documentary team into what was for him a new and undiscovered land, the hills, the plains, the twisting roads

that stretch below the straggling line of Mason and Dixon. with his fifth report on this modern odyssey is Mr. Cassidy. When the ill-fortuned Ponce de Leon first ventured ashore on the coast of Florida, he was seeking, so they tell us, the fountain of eternal youth. The Indians had told him that somewhere in

the jungle, they lay a magic spring, a thing of clear bubbling water, where whosoever drank would know eternal youth. The poor deluded conquistador wandered the length and breadth of this land, drank of a hundred springs and brooks, but he died, one fancies with some resentment at a respectable old age. Across the centuries we should like to advise him