PREFACE. 



DURING the last twenty-five years a great deal of 

 attention has been drawn to agriculture in the tropics, 

 as to other subjects connected with the same regions of the 

 world. Not only do people travel more in the tropical regions, 

 not only has there been great rivalry between the nations of 

 the North in acquiring and developing colonies there, but also 

 such agricultural phenomena as the collapse of coffee planting 

 and the rise of cinchona, cacao, and tea in Ceylon, the depres- 

 sion of sugar in the West Indies and the formation of an 

 Imperial Department of Agriculture to deal with the situation, 

 the recent rise of rubber planting in Ceylon, the Federated 

 Malay States, Mexico, and other tropical countries, and the 

 depression in cotton, followed by the formation of the British 

 Cotton Growing Association, and the extension of the cultiva- 

 tion of this crop in the West Indies and the British African 

 colonies, have all in themselves excited very general interest. 

 This has shown itself, among other things, in the formation 

 of departments of agriculture in most of the colonies of the 

 tropics. 



The danger is now that we may try to go too rapidly, with- 

 out a proper thinking out of the subject. There being no 

 general work upon tropical agriculture other than those dealing 

 with the technical side of the subject, such as Semler's great 

 volumes upon Tropische Agrikultur, Mollison's Textbook of 



