GROWING GOLD 



revenue to his ordinary income obtained as a forest 

 worker. 



Amongst the most valuable substitutes for mahogany 

 is Mitragyne macrophylla, the Benin name for this is 

 Ebben and the Yoroba name is Aburra. Although lighter 

 in colour to the mahogany experiments in wood tech- 

 nology show that the mechanical properties are very 

 similar to the true mahogany. 



This thrives best in areas that are periodically flooded, 

 so I selected a swamp area which I clear felled, leaving 

 only mother trees to provide seeds. This resulted in pro- 

 viding a wide belt of thick natural regeneration, seed- 

 lings growing from four to five feet during the first year. 



My Silvicultural experiment included the demarcat- 

 ing of a number of sample plots, the trees on which were 

 measured annually. In the first plot of Tectona grandis 

 the girth increment averaged over two inches for the 

 growing season, consisting of six months, thus showing 

 that it thrives better in the Southern Provinces of Ni- 

 geria than in Burma. Of course it remains to be seen 

 whether the wood is equally valuable. 



Up to the present very few species in the mahogany 

 forests are being utilized, and under such circumstances 

 the introduction of cultural systems are bound to be 

 costly, for they entail the removal of those species up till 

 now regarded as worthless owing to the absence of a 

 market. 



It may be that the next step towards assisting the 



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