CHAPTER VII 



PLANT LIFE IN THE TROPICS. ACCLIMATISATION 



THE agriculturist coming from Europe to the tropics must 

 entirely alter his point of view in regarding the vegetable world. 

 No longer is there any interruption of the growth and activity 

 of the plants by a winter. On the other hand, such interruption 

 as there is comes rather in the hottest part of the year, the dry 

 season. Near to the equator the dry seasons are so short that 

 vegetation goes on almost uninterruptedly, but further to the 

 north or the south, there is a dry season, of length increasing as 

 we get further from the equator, and in this season the growth 

 of the plants is little or none. Where there is a really long dry 

 season, as in northern India, irrigation, as already explained, is 

 a necessity if crops are to be grown for more than a compara- 

 tively small portion of the year. 



The agriculturist must learn, not only what are the most 

 suitable times of the year for sowing and for planting out 

 usually the wet seasons but he must learn to perform all the 

 other operations of husbandry pruning, manuring, cropping, 

 etc. with reference to the seasons. In most of Ceylon, for 

 instance, the great planting season is October-November, and 

 annual crops are reaped in February-March. 



The tropics possess, generally speaking, a great many 

 species of plants. Even Ceylon, only five-sixths the size of 

 Ireland, possesses more than twice as many as the whole of 

 Great Britain and Ireland. And on the whole, perhaps, they 

 similarly outnumber the temperate zones in the number of 

 useful cultivable plants; but in any one country there are 

 usually but few, and there are many others which may be 



