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THE TROPICAL AGRICULTURIST. 



[December i, 1882. 



without capital, a capital of thousands sterling, 

 wliilat a very small purse of savings will give a man 

 courage to buy and lay clown, in cacao and provi- 

 sions, a little plot of ten or twenty acres. Yet it 

 is pleasing to note that where a new line of road cuts 

 through virgin land, as at Conupia, by the railway, 

 buyers start up from the ground as it were, that no 

 one dreamt of, men in town successful in business 

 or trade whom no one had previously credited with 

 a taste for cultivation, yet who on being tested have 

 been found to be gifted with a somewhat Mechian 

 capacity for the pursuit quite equal to and in eome 

 respects possibly better than old clod-plodders to the 

 manner born, carrying into the new practice the habits 

 of foresight and perseverance that had gained them 

 their first successes and yielded them the means to 

 enter on an untried venture. 



Mr. Fabien's place, Enterprise Farm, a piece of 

 300 acres, lies on the opposite or cast side of the rail- 

 way. He has a mile of frontage on the line, and is 

 about a mile from the railway station. The farm 

 presents, for Trinidad, a very varied scene : Liberian 

 coffee is represented by 5,000 trees, the St. Anna' 

 hybrid coffee by 15,000 plants ; the Tonka-bens 

 tree by 1,000 plants, at present about 5 feet 

 high and which are expected to come into bearing 

 ia four years from this. Of tobacco, he has 25 acres, 

 managed by Mr. Anderson who brings Jamaica ex- 

 perience to the task : 5-6,000 lb. have been cured or 

 are now curing, of this crop, and some of it is on 

 sale in town. Mr. F. being apiarian as well, has 

 imported some Italian bees, got sunflower seed, hives, 

 and books and journals on the subject from America; 

 but in this line cannot yet speak of success, find- 

 ing the ' Qu'est ce qu'il dits' even fonder of his 

 bees than himself, and that the latter were attacked 

 also by a certain species of ant. In time, no doubt. 

 he will find a way to neutralize these attacks and 

 get a profit from his bees. He has succeeded in 

 making a Queso de mano, — little handmade cheeses 

 weighing a pound, cream white like the big llano 

 cheeses of Maturin wa get from the Spanish Main, 

 but much cleanlier. They have the same peculiar 

 sourness and absence of fatty richness, though made 

 from nnskimmed milk we are assured, but of a 

 flakey texture that some admire. For these cheeses, 

 Mr. F. says, he has a demand for more than he 

 now makes, though he gets half a dollar a lb. for 

 them. But his chief object in keeping a stock of 

 milk cows was to supply the town with pure milk, 

 a very laudable idea, to which a great many will 

 wish "sufces9. The milk is brought to town by rail 

 and has a remarkable keeping property. We are 

 not sure we have exhausted the list of experi- 

 ments — enterprizes we should rather call them, with 

 those we have named. Enough has been said, how- 

 ever, to shew the new spirit that has been evoked 

 by the opening of the Southern Railway — and the 

 certain extension of settlement that follows the judicious 

 construction of improved communications. Like causes, 

 lilte conveuienoes produce like effects here as in 

 Australia or America, though on a smaller scale. 

 If our ruling minds, freed from other care, would 

 direct their thought seriously to the subject, we 

 are persuaded they could attract settlement to the 

 island at a much faster rate than it is now pro- 

 gressing at ; and would not every interi'St in the 

 colony be advantaged thereby ? Who can doubt it ? 



THE TROPICAL REGIONS OF AUSTRALIA. 



Our readers are pretty familiar with th > " Northern 

 Territory " of South Austr.alia, if it were but for 

 the fact that the submarine telegraph cable by means 

 of which all the world communicates with the Aus- 



tralian colonies and they with all the world, has its 

 terminus at Port Darwin. Thence a land line was 

 carried over an immense stretch of uninhabited country. 

 Otherwise the management of the Northern Territory 

 was not, until recently, happy and its progress compares 

 poorly with the progress of Queensland. But then 

 Queensland may be said to be largely tropical and the 

 portion not within the tropics is certainly semi-tropical, 

 for plaintains and pineapples, in defiance of occasional 

 sharp frosts, are cultivated in the suburbs of the 

 capital, — Brisbane. While tropical Queensland, from 

 Rockhampton northwards by Mackay, Townsville, 

 Cooktown to Cape York, within 10° of the equator 

 (about as far south as Point Pedro is north of "the 

 line,") has made such considerable progress that the 

 inhabitants are clamouring for separation, the few set- 

 tlers in the Northern Territory of South Australia are 

 raising the same cry just because of the limited pro- 

 gress made by the scene of their enterprize. Their 

 great grievance at present is that of being made to 

 pay customs duties like their southern fellow-colonists. 

 If, however, they get the promised railway, there will 

 be large compensation. But a third Australian colony, 

 the largest of the group, Western Australia, has also 

 a tropical territory, stretching as far north as 12° from 

 the equator. In this region is the district of Kim- 

 berley with forty millions of acres of splendid, well- 

 watered and well-grassed land. Here stock flourishes, 

 notwithstanding the heat and the mosquitoes ; but 

 it is only natural that the culture of tropical pro- 

 ducts should be suggested in a region where palms 

 abound in the "scrub" or " forest " as we should say. 

 From the extract we take from the Perth Inquirer, 

 it will be seen that our nearest neighbours of the " fifth 

 continent" are under the impression that Sinhalese 

 labour would be specially useful in the culture of coffee 

 and cinchona. The Australians will soon discover, 

 however, that it is to the densely peopled portions 

 of continental India they must look for the la- 

 bourers who can work in their permanently hot 

 regions, and we have no doubt tliat Western Australia 

 will speedily follow in the wake of Fiji, South Aus- 

 tralia and Queensland in seeking to make arrangements 

 with the Indian Government for systematic cooly 

 immigration. The difficulty will be not with the 

 Indian Government, but from the prejudices — in many 

 cases the honest convictions of the Australian se'tlers 

 themselves. Such a man as Joseph Cook, wliile pre- 

 dicting the grandest possible future for the " hundred 

 millions" of Australia and a most beneficial influence for 

 good on Asia as a result, joined in the protest against 

 the introduction of Asiatics. The editor of the Sydney 

 Mail very pertinently .asks what the cotton crop of 

 the United States would be were the Negro element 

 to be removed. If pastoral pursuits alone were in 

 question — and curiously enough, intense heat in Aus- 

 tralia is compatible with good mutton and fine wool, 

 good beef and strong horses — if pastoral pursuits 

 alone were in question, of course, there would be no 

 occasion for a mixture of races, — at least for special 

 steps to introduce Indian coolies. But if sugarcane, 

 coffee, cocoa, and other strictly fmpioal products are 

 to be grown, cooly labour, guided and aided by 

 whites, is inilispensable, and in all pmbabil'ty the 

 design of Providence is that Asia should be re-aded 

 on beneficially by yellow skins and black skins return- 

 ing from Austral-Asia, imbued with the enterprize, 

 industry, wealth, civilization and Christ ianily with 

 which as labourers they came in contact. Tliere is a 



