ALMOND CULTURE IN CALIFORNIA. 333 



At many kinds of work white men are more profitable to employ 

 than Chinamen, though they demand much higher wages. At 

 picking almonds the Chinaman is preferable at the same wages. 

 Fewer nuts escape his keen eye to be left on the tree or under the 

 clods. He can pick more in a day, and with less damage to the 

 tree and the nuts. 



In large orchards a more complicated but still crude and un- 

 satisfactory rubber is sometimes operated by horse or steam 

 power. But the nuts and drupes must still be separated by hand, 

 and probably always will be. The drupes are mostly only loos- 

 ened by the machine, many of them not even that, and but few 

 of them entirely rubbed off. This last might be done by machin- 

 ery in the case of quite hard-shelled nuts. But more force is re- 

 quired to remove the drupe than to break the shell of a large por- 

 tion of the crop. In some orchards every year, and in many 

 orchards this year, the only way to market the almond was to 

 crack it with the drupe on and sell the kernel. Others who did 

 not deliberately crack were obliged to rub so hard that many of 

 the kernels came out, and at the close of the harvest they had 

 barrels of them to sell as shelled almonds. The price per pound 

 is greater than of unshelled almonds, but my neighbors say that 

 the addition to the price does not make up for the weight of 

 shells thrown away, to say nothing of the extra labor and expense 

 of cracking. 



Where the picking was done by hand, and paid for by the box, 

 it cost this year, in this vicinity, seventy to ninety cents a box. 

 The box used is what is called the large-sized free apple-box. 

 That is, it is the box which holds an honest bushel, and goes with 

 the apples when they are sold in the market. The first boxes I 

 got from the factory were free apple-boxes, and I supposed that 

 was all right and sufficient, until the Chinese foreman of our band 

 of pickers brought out the box he had used in former years, and I 

 saw that mine were smaller just enough smaller not to arouse 

 suspicion in the breast of the final consumer when he buys apples 

 by the box, and at the same time to save the middle-man, who 

 buys by the pound and sells by the box, a few pounds in each box 

 he sells. He prefers that the producer should ship his fruit in 

 these dishonest boxes, just as the San Francisco butter dealers, 

 who buy by the pound and sell by the roll, caution the farmers 

 not to put quite two pounds in a roll. So I found that my apple- 

 boxes were short-weight boxes, and were losing me the cost of 

 picking about three pounds out of every box of almonds picked ; 

 and that this loss would in one season cover, several times over, 

 the price of the boxes. I put this part of the story in for what- 

 ever it may be scientifically worth, as a contribution to the study 

 of commercial ethics. I bought the larger-sized bushel boxes as 



