TEA AND SILK FARMING IN NEW ZEALAND. 175 



TEA AND SILK FARMING IN NEW ZEALAND. 

 By William Cochran, Overdale, Dunblane, Pertlisliire. 

 [Premium — Fifteen Sovereigns.] 



Early in 1864 the writer visited China, with the intention of 

 remaining in that country a few years. His main object was 

 the practical study of tea management and sericiculture in the 

 natural home of these interesting avocations, with the view of 

 subsequently conveying the experience thus acquired to India, 

 or to some other suitable dependency or colony of Great Britain, 

 where it might afterwards be found that tea and silk farming 

 could be profitably conducted, and where there were facilities for 

 the creation of a large industrial establishment. At this period, 

 and for fully twelve years previously, tea cultivation had taken 

 root in India, chiefly on account of the transfer, in 1839 and 

 1840, of the bulk of the gardens, experimentally planted by 

 Government, to the Assam Company ; but the progress of the 

 undertaking as a whole had scarcely answered the predictions 

 of its earlier successes, as, up to 1864, the total export of Indian 

 grown tea was only 3,285,000 lbs. per annum, as compared with 

 the imports of China and Japan tea to this country that year 

 amounting to 120,284,000 lbs. It was not that Indian tea 

 enterprise lacked encouragement, because not only had the 

 Government taken it up with all commendable energy from 

 the first, and afterwards distributed thousands of tea-plants and 

 hundreds of tons of seed gratis to all who chose to apply, but 

 rather that the entire industry was new, and very few persons in 

 India then, and for some years afterwards, thoroughly knew its 

 details. The tyro, aspiring to reach the summit of any vocation, 

 has from the remotest times been required to sit for a specified 

 apprenticeship at the feet of some properly accredited Gamaliel 

 until he had acquired at least the rudiments of the calling he 

 proposed to follow. In proportion, also, to the abstruseness of 

 the theorems, and the delicacy and difficulty of the manipula- 

 tions he might have to learn — aided of course by his natural 

 ability and industry — would l^e the demand for mental and 

 physical application ere he could claim to bo regarded as a 

 master. This self-evident truth seems to have been almost for- 

 gotten or ignored during the earlier years of tea preparation in 

 India. It is simply astonishing now to take a retrospect of 

 tliese former days, and learn that intending planters, after per- 

 liaps a cursory acquaintance with a few tea samples in the 

 Lond(jn market, never tliouglit of practically learning their 

 business by Hocking to the tea districts of China — the only 

 existing school at tliat time, and probal)ly the most efficient even 



