) POM ee ee eta Cr oT ee Oy 5 ke eae we ghee Pf ne ee, See Oe oP at ee ee ee 
1082 
articles of this class could be utilized at a paper mill without any pre- 
liminary cleaning or sorting. — 
Betel-nut palm is found both in the wild and cultivated state.” 
“The spathes which cover the flowering axis may be used for paper making, 
as so also might the fibrous pericarp which is removed from the nuts. The spathes 
are largely used in India for packing and in the preparation of small articles for 
personal use.” 
~ Nipa palm is a well-known and valuable plant which for the most 
part is cultivated. As this plant is found only within the influence of 
salt water, near the seashore, and as considerable commerce in the leaves 
of this plant for thatching purposes is already established, the long 
leafstalks, which contain a strong structural fiber but which are at present 
discarded as worthless, are available in large quantities. 
Coconut palm.—The commercial fiber of this plant, known as corr, is 
found in the husk or fibrous pericarp surrounding the nut. 
“The fiber is much impaired by waiting for the nuts to arrive at maturity, — 
consequently, for fibrous purposes, the latter are usually cut at about the tenth 
month. If cut earlier than this, the fiber is weak; if later, it becomes coarse 
and hard, requires a longer soaking, and is more difficult to manufacture.” 
Walker '* has shown that the percentage of husks from nuts too green 
to be used for copra is 70 per cent of the total weight, that this quantity 
_ is 51 per cent on the kind of nuts ordinarily employed for copra produc- 
tion and about 33 per cent on thoroughly ripe, brown ones. 
There is no established commerce in coir or coconut fiber in the Phil- 
ippines, but there is a large and growing industry in copra, and coconut 
oil production is steadily increasing. Practically all the husks en- 
countered in the coconut districts are dry, brown, and unfit for coir 
cordage, so that at the present time they are only used for fuel or thrown 
away. That the amount of coconut husks annually consumed is consider- 
able is evidenced from the statistics on copra exportations. 
In 1905 approximately 60,000 tons of copra were exported. This represents 
over 400,000 tons of nuts, which in turn represents an approximately equivalent 
weight of husks. These data do not include the vast quantity of nuts husked for 
local consumption, nor the nuts and oil exported as such. 
As copra and oil will probably always be the products of first value 
in this industry, the husks produced and now almost exclusively used for 
fuel will be of a very inferior grade and their unsefulness for purposes 
other than fuel will, on this account, be limited. However, coconut 
husks contain considerable fiber, and as they are now a rather worthless 
% Watt: Dictionary of Economic Products of India, 1, 298. 
3 Spon’s Encyclopaedia, 1, 939. 
“The coconut and its relation to the production ct roconut oil, Phil. Journ. 
Science (1906), 1, 68-73. 
PN ae 
