Mn George S. Hudson 181 



and daily " changing " of the cacao. Although 

 I had followed this practice for over twenty 

 years, yet I never grasped its full significance 

 until I instituted a thorough examination of 

 fermenting temperatures. In one or two in- 

 stances, through carelessness or over-pressure 

 of work, the sweating box attendant for a 

 single morning omitted to ''change " the spare 

 fermenting boxes with which I was experi- 

 menting : in every such case there was a 

 marked loss of temperature. ' Even when 

 " changing " had been conscientiously per- 

 formed, plunging the thermometer, say twenty 

 times, in different parts of a fermenting mass 

 of cacao on the third or fourth dav, when high 



y o 



temperatures are commencing, would result in 

 six or seven different readings, with perhaps 

 as much as 5 F. difference between the maxi- 

 mum and minimum ; this demonstrates that 

 fermentation does not take place as a uni- 

 form, continuous process throughout a box, but 

 rather as the result of numerous independent 

 colonies of yeasts, all working towards the 

 same object but with varying results. It was 

 made amply clear to me that although the 

 "breaking bulk" process known as "chang- 

 ing " resulted primarily in a loss of tempera- 

 ture, identically the same as occurs from the 

 removal of the leaf cover, yet within a few 

 hours the thorough mixing 1 and diffusion of 



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the fermenting yeasts results in the tempera- 

 ture rising much higher than was the case 



