126 OIL-SEEDS AND OILS 



Efforts are now being made, however, to employ machinery 

 for cracking the nuts and picking out the kernels in place of 

 the slow tedious methods now in use, and doubtless other 

 similar improvements will follow, for the demand for palm 

 oil continually increases. 



The two great bays in the Gulf of Guinea are the Bights of 

 Benin and Biafra. The rivers which flow into these bights 

 flow for the most part through palm-oil forests, and have at 

 their mouths palm-oil towns. They are separated by the 

 mouths of the Niger, whose delta alone covers 14,000 square 

 miles of alluvial forest and jungle. The arms of the delta 

 have long been known as the Oil Rivers. They include such 

 names as the Brass River, and the Bonny, which seem indeed 

 to reek of oil, as does the Old Calabar farther to the east. 



The most important British part of this eight hundred 

 miles of coast is now called Southern Nigeria. Lagos in the 

 west, at the terminus of the railway to Kano, is the chief sea- 

 port for the whole district, and from it enormous quantities 

 of oil are exported. 



Other oil-producing British colonies of West Africa are 

 Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and Gambia, but the bulk of 

 our oil imports come from Southern Nigeria. 



Before the war practically all the palm kernels were exported 

 to Germany, and we bought a certain amount of palm-kernel 

 oil from her, but in 1917 over 200,000 tons of kernels were 

 imported by us from our West African Colonies, and also 

 about a fourth of this amount from foreign countries, chiefly 

 from the Belgian Congo. 



COCO-NUT PALM (Cocos nucifera) . Along the sandy shores 

 of tropical lands, their ruddy roots and brown trunks contrasting 

 with the deep blue of the encircling ocean, stand groves of tall 

 coco-nut palms. They grow to a height of sixty or eighty feet. 

 The trunk is not very thick ; in a full-grown tree its diameter 

 measures only about eighteen inches. 



It is bare of leaves, but is scarred all up its height with rings 

 marking the places where the leaves have fallen off, for the 



