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THE TROPICAL AGRICULTURIST, 



[May i, 1885. 



wheat and as hardy as rye would change the 

 face of Northern Europe ; while one which could 

 flourish on ■ exhausted Boil or in a damp climate, 

 might affect the distiibulion of mankind. -The direct 

 gain of mankind fromeuch a discovery might be counted 

 by hundreds of millions; and we know of no law of 

 Nature which should prevent it, and of no guarantee 

 that the cultivating races have exhausted search. 

 They most of them, in the early ages, when they 

 longed for substitutes for lish, and meat, and berries, 

 must have clutched the first edible grass they could 

 find without much hunting for better. Farmers will 

 smile, but there may be grains they never saw. 

 Mincing Lane thinks it knows all about tea, and no 

 doubt does know a good deal ; but Mr. Alexander 

 Hosie, of the Chinese Consular service, has eaten and 

 drank a tea which needs no sugar. At least, in 

 the fascinating report which he has presented to 

 Sir H. Parkes, and which has just been published 

 by Parliament to teach travellers how to observe, 

 ■while recording the result of bis hunt after white 

 tree-wax, he says : — "I come now to the last class 

 of tea, the discovery of Mr. Baber. If my memory 

 is not at fault, he was regaled by a priest on Mount 

 Ormci with tea possessing both the flavour of milk 

 and sugar. It may have been in the very temple 

 on the lr.uuutain-side in which I am now writing that 

 Mr. Baber was agreeably surprised. At any-rate, I 

 am sipping an infusion which is without doubt 

 sweet, and which is declared by the priest to 

 be brewed from a natura'ly-piepared tea-leaf. It 

 is a large dark-brown leaf, aud is very sweet 

 when chewed. The people at the bottom of 

 the mountain, whom I first questioned regarding this 

 tea, assorted that the leavis were sweet because they 

 were first steeped in molasses; but the balance of 

 evidence, as I have since fouud from extensive in- 

 quiry, is against any such artificial preparation. The 

 tree is said to grow in only one gorge in the mount- 

 ain, whence the leaves are brought for sale." What 

 will Minting Lane give for a shipload of that tea, 

 the very existence of which, till drunk and eaten, 

 the dealers would have regarded as a solemn j ke? 

 Men are wise about silk-culture in Italy and Southern 

 France; but they do not know, as the Chinese told 

 Mr. Hosie, that the mulberry-leaf is too strong food 

 for baby-silkworms, and that the wretched little insect, 

 if you want plenty of silk, should be fed-ap iu 

 earliest infancy on the leaves o; a silkworm thorn- 

 tree, fifteen feet hi^h, unknown to Europeans though 

 Mr. Hosie found it everywhere in Szechuen, growing 

 by the roadsides, and as hardy as the thorns, of 

 which it is a variety, usually are. How much 

 difference in annual cash-earnings would the im- 

 portation of that thorn make in Loir.bardy ? Why 

 should not the Governments, which so steadily map 

 out the seas, even combining to do it, institute a 

 patient and exhaustive search for new grasses able 

 to produce flour, and new vegetables fit for eating '! 

 They might not produce many Mr. Hosics, who. if 

 the Members of Parliament read his report, Mill very 

 soon find himself as well-known in London as any 

 papular author ; but they also might. The men like 

 .Mr. Fortune and Mr. Hosie, the men whose observ- 

 ation nothing escapes, are not rare among botanists, 

 and would need but little encouragement to carry on 

 for years a persistent inquiry which, if carefully 

 limited to defined objects, would almost certainly pro- 

 duce some considerable result. The work, it will be 

 said, is one for Societies ; but it seems a pity to waste 

 the great resource which Governments possess in the 

 wide distribution of their agencies, and in their power 

 of carrying-on their enquiries without reference to time, 

 There will be a Legation at Pekin and Lima, and 

 Jeddo, and Teheran, a hundred years hence : and one 

 official inquirer who records everything, and is re- 



placed when he departs, and is always protected and 

 treated with civility, can, in that space of time, 

 accumulate much knowledge, aud will cost but little 

 money. It is organized and protracted inquiry, not 

 a mere spasmodic effort, that we want to see, anil 

 that will benefit mankind. Let the Societies hunt 

 for their rare orchids, and plants with lovely blooms 

 and all manner of scientific novelties, and let the 

 Governments promote the search for prosaic things 

 which the ordinary inquirer will neglect. We shall 

 find no new edible animal, we fear, unless it be 

 some variety of goat which can be bred into fatness 

 and made to yield sweet meat — kid properly cooked, 

 that is, roasted to death, is better than most mutton 

 — but a new cereal is clearly a possibility, and might 

 be worth all the botanical discoveries made since 

 the settlers in Virginia sent home the potato. The 

 late Mr. Bagehot, who was always dropping witty 

 wisdom, used to say that the wildest speculator he 

 ever heard of was the first man who dropped grain 

 into the earth and waittd till it grew up, and to 

 regret that his name, like that of the discoverer 

 of fire, and of the first man who mastered a horse, 

 was for ever lost. We think we may venture to say 

 that the name of the man who next discovers a cereal 

 of true value will not be,— Spectator, March 7th. 



Bhea Fibre. — "Sugarcane" gives us a paper by 

 H. S. Bergman from the New York Bulletin giving 

 the practical results of Rhea culture in the north 

 of France and iu the United States, which seem very 

 satisfactory. Full particulars will be given in the T. A. 



Timber Preservation jrom Fibre. — At a time 

 when our tea-planters especially have reason to be 

 anxious about guarding their tea factories from 

 fire, we call attention to the paragraph on page 

 851 (for which we are indebted to Messrs. Carson 

 & Co.) giving a very simple and inexpensive way of 

 preserving timber from decay and apparently against fire. 



Tea in Uva. — There cannot be the slightest doubt 

 of the suitableness of the higher divisions of Uva for tea, 

 all the top estates in Haputale with their fine soil <n%ht 

 to give splendid returns, and so with much of Badulla. 

 We learn that tea on the Spring Valley Company 

 estates is growing luxuriantly and altogether on this 

 group there will be a total of 500 to 600 acres 

 of tea planted very shortly, besides 900 acres of fine 

 old coffee kept in cultivation. The hardly-tried pro- 

 prietors in Haputale West ought to look to tea as, 

 perhaps, the only product that can redeem the re- 

 putation of their district. 



Lightning in the Tropics. — My experience confirms the 

 remarks of Dr. Von Danckelman in Nature (p. 127) respect- 

 ing the little damage done by lightning in tropical climates. 

 In the plains of India at the commencement of the mon- 

 soon, storms occur in which the lightning runs like snakes 

 all over the sky at the rate of three or four flashes in a 

 second, aud the thunder roars without a break for, fre- 

 quently, one or two hours at a time. During twelve years' 

 residence in India I heard of ouly two human beings and, 

 I think, three buildings being struck, although in parts of 

 Lower Bengal the population amounts to more than 600 

 to the square mile. I always attributed the scarcity of 

 accidents to the great depth of the stratum of heated air 

 next the grouud keeping the clouds at such a height that 

 most of the flashes pass from cloud to cloud, aud very few 

 reach the earth. This idea is supported by the fact that 

 in the Himalayas, at 6,000 feet or more above the sea, 

 buildings and trees are frequently struck. I have seen 

 more than a dozen piue-trees which had been injured by 

 lightning on the top of one mountain between 8,000 and 

 9,000 feet high. Iu the British Islands thunderstorms are 

 said to be more dangerous in winter than in summer, and 

 such a fact, if true, can be explained by the very thin 

 stratum of air then intervening between the clouds and 

 earth.— J. J. Meybick. London, December 19th, 1884.— 

 Nature. 



