172 VEGETABLE SUBSTANCES. 



culture. This circumstance occurring with regard to 

 a substance highly nutritive, in a climate which dis- 

 poses the human frame to inaction, occasions the 

 adoption of sago in many places as the general food 

 of the population, to the neglect of other plants, the 

 cultivation of which would call for some amount of 

 exertion. 



The sago, or, as it is called in the Molucca 

 Islands, the libley tree, is of peculiar growth. The 

 trunk, which is formed of the bases of the leaves, 

 grows at first very slowly, and is covered with thorns ; 

 so soon, however, as the stem is once formed, the 

 growth of the tree proceeds with very great rapidity, 

 so that it speedily attains its full height of thirty feet, 

 with a girth of five or six feet, losing in this stage 

 its thorny accompaniments. Like the cocoa-nut tree, 

 the sago has no distinct bark that can be peeled 

 off, but the trunk consists of a long, hard, ligneous 

 tube, about two inches thick, the internal area of 

 which is filled with a kind of farinaceous pith, inter- 

 mixed with numerous longitudinal fibres. The ma- 

 turity of the tree is known by the transpiration of a 

 kind of whitish dust through the pores of the leaves, 

 and when this appears the trunk is felled near to the 

 ground. 



The best account of this tree, and of the mode of 

 preparing its pith for use as human food, is to be 

 seen in Forrest's account of the Molucca Islands : it 

 is to the following effect. 



* The tree being felled, is cut into lengths of five 

 or six feet. A part of the hard wood is then sliced 

 off, and the workman, coming to the pith, cuts across 

 the longitudinal fibres and the pith together, leaving 

 a part at each end uncut, so that when it is exca- 

 vated, there remains a trough, into which the pulp 

 is again put, mixed with water, and beaten with a piece 

 of wood. Then the fibres, separated from the pulp, 



