219 



This is evidently not the view of a contributor to the " Bnllefiti 

 ■de V Asxociaiion de\ Flanleiirs de Caoutchouc" of Xovember 1919 

 who writes, page 91, "It is to be observed that the cultivation of 

 ihe palm {Elacis) is appreeiablj easier than that of llevea, for 

 the fruit is obtained by mere picking, and the question does not 

 arise, as it does in the case of Hevea, whether the yield is pre- 

 mature or too heavy." 



We think this writer attempts to prove too much. The word 

 ■^' cueillette " literally means " picking ""^and is applied to a goose- 

 berry, an apple, or a papaya, but there i^, no picking the fruit of 

 Elaeis guineensis; it is sheer hard whacking that does it and tlie 

 following account is intended to prove it. 



At 7.45 a.m. on the 10th of February, the present writer start- 

 ed woi'k with one coolie to cut a bunch of fruit, at 8 feet from the 

 ground on the previously described tree-. 



The spines on the branches had £rst to be pared with a parang, 

 the man supporting himself, with his feet on the stumps of leaves 

 which had been previously cut, his left hand holding on to a leaf 

 .above him, whilst the right liand was kept hacking with a parang 

 :at the leaf immediately IjcIow the bunch. At 8 o'clock exactly, the 

 leaf fell, bringing down with it a lot of decayed matter, and at 

 that moment, a great number of ants appeared, compelling the 

 man to jump down. A ladder was sent for, and by 8.10 o'clock 

 the man was al)le to resume his work by cutting the two leaves, 

 -one on the right, and the other on the left side of the bunch, and 

 this took another seven minutes. Access to the bunch was now 

 free, and after eight minutes more of hacking at the tough and 

 thick peduncle, the bunch, severed at last from the tree, fell to 

 the ground. It was then S.2o o'clock, so that the actual time it 

 took to bring the bunch down was from 7.45 to 8.25, i.e. (less 10 

 minutes of interruption) exactly half-an-hour. 



At the store, the lumcli was found to weigh 18 lbs., and with 

 its 3 inclies of peduncle, it measured 18 inches in length and it 

 was about one foot in diameter. One side of it had only a few 

 fully-developed fruit. 



As far as the writer is aware, the oidy way to deal with the 

 bunch is to lay it on its side and, with a sharp parang or an axe, 

 to split it longitudinally in two halves, then laying each half on 

 its flat side (the side just cut), to split it also in two. We thus 

 have 4 quarters from which it is, comparatively, easy to dig out 

 or pull out or wrench out Ity torsion, the fruit from the spiny 

 bracts which hold tliem, a work wliich took 10 minutes to effect. 

 The result was 206 fully-devcldpod fruit, weighing altogether 7 lbs. 

 In the bunch Avere also found a large number of misshapped and 

 Tindevelopcd fruit, the size and shape of a clove of garlic or even 

 smaller, the result of incomplete fertilisation, or of compression in 

 the l)unch by the leaf at the axil of which the bunch is formed. 

 Such fruit cannot be dealt with by any hand process which the 

 writer can conceive. Whetlier they have any oil in them, and 

 whether they can be dealt witli mechanically, so as .to pav costs by 

 the extracted oil, he has no means of judging, but he is inclined 



