November i, 1884.] TFK TROPICAL AGRICULTURIST, 



3Si 



coal forms one-third of her tonnage, this means an enorm- 

 ous addition to her cargo room, and, consequently, to 

 her earning power. " Of seventy stokers to handle 200 

 tons of coal per day and put out the atones, sixty may 

 be left at home. Instead of 2,000 tons of dead weight 

 iu coal, the steamer may carry 400. In carrying and 

 consuming large quantities of coal, the matter of ballast 

 is a serious consideration. A hydro-carbon liquid, car- 

 ried ill several tanks, would be expelled therefrom to the 

 furnaces by pumping water into the tanks, the ballast 

 remaining nearly the same." It has been pointed out 

 that the use of such fuel is specially suited to fast-sail- 

 ing cruisers, which may be required to stay at sea for 

 a long period, without being necessitated to put into 

 port or station for coal. As has heen indicated, yester- 

 day's experiments were so successful as to justify the be- 

 lief that an extension of the method described at the 

 works is almost certain to follow, to be attended it is 

 believed, with gre»t advantage in various ways. This is 

 the first occasion, it is stated, on which this cheap oil 

 refuse has been so applied in Scotland, The inventor of 

 -the method, Mr. E. C. Burgess, conducted the experi- 

 ments, which were watched with much interest by Sir 

 Thomas Taucred. 



EXPERIMENTS WITH NEW FUEL. 



Sir, — .Referring to the excellent article in your impression 

 of last Thursday, headed "The Forth Bridge Works- 

 Experiments with New Fuel," permit me to point out 

 that the process referred to is not in the experimental 

 stage your correspondent seems to imagine. The hydro- 

 carbon process described in the article is the original 

 invention ot Dr. Holland, of Chicago, and his process 

 has for some time been successfully employed in America 

 competing with coal on locomotives. Engines worked in 

 this manner are now running on the New York, Lake 

 Erie, and Western Railway ; it is also in use tor dom- 

 estic and many other purposes. The patent rights for 

 Europe are in the hands of an influential syndicate, 

 whose engineer, Mr. E. O. Burgess, has succeeded in 

 adapting the Holland process to the shale and coal oils 

 of Great Britain and the crude petroleum found in 

 vast quantities in Europe, and not necessarily to only 

 Scottish oil as mentioned by your correspondent. 

 The employment of the process at Forth Bridge 

 Works is somewhat beyond an experiment, as the ap- 

 paratus has been during the last eighteen months 

 thoroughly tested at the syndicate's works in London 

 as well as put into competiou with coal at the long trial, 

 at Messrs. Oliver & Co.'s engineering works, Chesterfield. 

 I can fully endorse the other remarks of your corre- 

 spondent as to the magnitude of the invention, and I 

 look before long to see the process rank with coal and 

 electricity for giving motive power. Apologising for tak- 

 ing up your valuable space. — I am, etc., Arthur Radford. 

 Secretary of the Hydro-Carbon Syndicate, Ld., IS Lawrence 

 Pountney Hill, E. O. 



TEA CULTURE AND " JAT." 

 The correspondent who writes (page 352) on this sub- 

 ject seems to know so much about the peculiarities of 

 beat jat tea, -that we suspect his object in writing 

 is more to denounce some malefactor who palmed 

 off inferior seed on him as best hybrid, than to 

 obtain information respecting varieties of the tea 

 plant. We attempted to give him the information 

 he seemed to desiderate, "and, in resorting to the 

 Tropical Agriculturist, he might have found some- 

 thing better to refer to (he talks of " an article" 

 as i; by the editor !) than a letter by a Mr. Stuart 

 Craneton, a Glasgow grocer, who, having dealt in 

 China tea all his life, naturally exalted it above the 

 superior Indian tea. As to Col. Money's views, it 

 is better to take them at tirst hand from the latest 

 .edition of his own book, which we reviewed at great 

 length recently. We quote as follows: — 



The indigenous tree has a leaf of 9 inches long and 

 more. The leaf of the China bush never exceeds-! inches. 



The indigenous leaf is a bright pale green, the China leaf 

 a dull dark green colour. The indigenous " flushes," that 

 is, produces new tender leaf, much more copiously than 

 the China, and this in two ways ; first, the leaves are 

 larger, and thus if only even in number exceed in hulk 

 what the China has given; and secondly, it flushes oftener. 

 The infusion of tea made from the indigenous species is 

 far more "rasping" and pungent" than what the China 

 plant can give, and the tea commands a much higher 

 price. The young leaves, from which alone tea is made, 

 are of a much finer and softer texture in the indigenous 

 than in the China; the former may be compared to satin, 

 the latter to lejther. The young leaves of the indigenous* 

 moreover, do not harden so quickly as those of the China; 

 thus, if there is any unavoidable delay in picking a flush, 

 the loss is less with the former. In the fact that uu- 

 pruued or unpicked plants (for picking is a miniature 

 pruning) give fewer and less succulent young leaves 

 which harden quicker than pruned ones, the two varieties 

 would seem to be alike. The China variety is much more 

 prolific of seed than the indigenous; the former also gives 

 it When younger, and as seed checks leaf, the. China is 

 inferior iu this as in other respects. The China is by 

 far the hardier plant ; it is much easier to rear, and 

 it will grow iu widely differing climates, which the in- 

 digenous will not. 



A patch of indigenous with a mature flush on it is a 

 pretty sight. The plants all appear as if crowned with 

 gold (they are truly so if other advantages exist), and 

 are a great contrast to the China variety if it can also 

 be seen near. 



I have now, I think, pointed out the leading charac- 

 teristics of the two original varieties of the tea plant, and 

 it stands to reason no one would grow the China who could 

 get indigenous. But the truth is a pure specimen of either 

 is rare. The plants between indigenous and China are 

 called ''hybrids." They were in the first instance pro- 

 duced by the innoculation, when close together, of the 

 pollen of one kind into the flower of the other, and the 

 result was a true hybrid, partaking equally of the in- 

 digenous and China characteristics ; but the process was re- 

 peated again and again between the said hybrid and an 

 indigenous or China, and again later between hybrids of 

 different degrees, so that now there are very many vari- 

 eties of the tea plaut — 100 or even more — and no garden 

 is wholly indigenous or wholly China. So close do the 

 varieties run, no one can draw the line and say where the 

 China becomes a hybrid, the hybrid an indigenous. Though 

 as a rule the young leaves are light green or dark green 

 as the plant approaches the indigenous or China in its 

 character, there are a certain class of bushes all hybrid, 

 whose young leaves have strong shades of crimson and 

 purple. Some even are quite red, others quite purple. 

 These colours do not last as the leaf hardens, and the 

 matured leaves of these plants do not differ from others. 

 Plants with these coloured leaves are prolific. 

 Colonel Money takes th position ih -t it would have 

 been better if China tea had never been introduced 

 to hybridize the superior Ass mi plant. ( Cultivation 

 would not. have been so widely extended, but th" 

 produce would have been superior. Baildon, in his 

 book, takes the more general and more correct 

 view, thus : -- 



Taking India as the real home of tea, there was, of 

 course, primarily, but one kind of plant. But I am re- 

 minded, in thus writing, of the botanical classification of 

 the //''"' tiiridis, and the Then bohea. I was recently in- 

 formed by a well-known professional botanist, that it is 

 still almost an open question as to what is the difference 

 between the two plants ; and that there is no doubt as to 

 their having originally been one and the same. In India, 

 making either green or black tea depends upon the will 

 of the planter. 



But all writers on Indian tea have been obliged to give 

 three classes of the plant — the indigenous, the China, aud 

 the hybrid; though according to the theory I have men- 

 tioned, the China plant is but a deteriorated specimen of 

 the pure (Indian) plant. But centuries of varied cultivation 

 in a climate not its own, and no small amount of neglect 

 have made this wandering offshoot a distinct variety al- 

 though ranking botanically partly under the same name 

 as its parent, Tkea bohea\ so distinct, indeed, as to have 



