602 FOREST CULTURE AND 
out my duty; I cannot step beyond this. Private 
enterprise and commercial capital must do the rest to 
advance also this culture here to industrial dimen- 
sions. The long-continued prejudice, that Tea can- 
not be cultivated with mercantile remunerativeness 
beyond the boundaries of China, has at last been over- 
come in the Southern States of the American Union, 
where a commencement has been made with the pro- 
duction of Tea from indigenous fields. At Assam, 
also, Tea is, since some years, largely cultivated by 
English planters, to one of whom, Mr. Bruce, for- 
merly of this city, I am under obligation for his disin- 
terested liberality of providing seeds in large quantity 
at my solicitation, while I owe the first large consign- 
ment of China seeds to the generosity of Sir Hercules 
Robinson, who sent it about a dozen years ago on my 
application. I fancy that Tea plantations, even if 
made in first instance only for raising local supplies of 
seeds, would be profitable, the transit from China or 
Assam being difficult on account of the short vitality 
of the seed. : 
It is well known that, in China and Japan, hitherto, 
with an unalterable obstinacy to any changes of meth- 
od, the preparation of the tea - leaves is carried on by 
primitive processes of unaided manual labor, without 
any mechanical appliances of machinery. But what 
would be the onward course of literary intelligence 
if we had still to adhere to the original ‘manual op- 
erations under which writing and printing paper was 
produced, or if we had continued reluctant to adopt 
the mighty steam - power, to speed and cheapen the 
production of print, when nowadays even the simple 
folding of printed sheets is rapidly done by machine- 
