PROFITS OF COFFEE PLANTATIONS 197 



who should be possessed of at least 3,000^, first to become 

 acquainted with the country, and practically to study the cultiva- 

 tion of coffee before settling. The nature of the soil, the 

 vicinity of a road or of an inhabited place for the facility of 

 obtaining manure, are important considerations. It is not 

 advisable to purchase more than five or six hundred acres, nor 

 to cultivate in the first year more than 100 or 150 acres, begin- 

 ning with the lower part of the estate and then ascending the 

 slopes, so as to profit as long as possible by the drainage of the 

 higher grounds. Large plantations of several thousand acres are 

 attended with the serious disadvantage that, as they are too ex- 

 tensive to be overlooked in detail, the owner is obliged to trust 

 a great part of the management to strangers, who of course 

 make him jpay well for their trouble. Thus coffee-planting, 

 though it may insure a competence to the prudent cultivator, 

 by no means opens a rapid road to wealth, as most of the specu- 

 lators vainly imagined who, previous to 1845, embarked their 

 fortunes in the enterprise, and whose visions of opulence ended 

 in the disaster and ruin which are the necessary consequences 

 of extravagance and folly. 



Like every other plant cultivated by man, the coffee-tree is 

 exposed to the ravages of many enemies. Wild cats, monkeys, 

 and squirrels prey upon the ripening berries, and hosts of cater- 

 pillars feed upon the leaves. Since 1847 the Ceylon plantations 

 have been several times invaded by swarms of the Grolunda, a 

 species of rat which inhabits the forests, making its nest among 

 the roots of the trees, and, like the lemmings of Norway and 

 Lapland, migrating in vast numbers when the seeds of the 

 nilloo-shrub (Strobilanthes), its ordinary food, are exhausted. 

 "In order to reach the buds and blossoms of the coffee, the 

 Golunda eats such slender branches as would not sustain, its 

 weight, and feeds as they fall to the ground ; and so delicate and 

 sharp are its incisors, that the twigs thus destroyed are detached 

 by as clean a cut as if severed with a knife. The Malabar 

 coolies are so fond of its flesh that they evince a preference for 

 those districts in which the coffee-plantati«is are subject to its 

 incursions, frying the rats in oil or converting them into curry. "* 



Another great plague is the Lecanium Coffece, known to 



* Tennent's Ceylon, vol. ii. p. 234. 



