256 CULTIVATION AND MANUFACTURE OF TEA. 



eventually all will, wither, roll, fire, and sort by the help of machines. 

 It says not a little for the enterprise and the inventive genius of the 

 Anglo-Saxon race that, while in China the manufacture of Tea dates 

 back many centuries, and yet all the Tea is still made by hand, we in 

 India, who have only planted Tea some forty years, have invented 

 machines and use them to-day for each and every operation in 

 manufacture. It is but as yesterday that we imported Chinamen to 

 teach us the modus operandi. We now know far more than they do on 

 the subject, and verily the pupil has beaten his master. 



Though machinery reduces the cost of production, and in more 

 than one case improves the quality of Tea, and planters know it, the 

 difficulty before them to-day is to know which is the best machine for 

 each operation. Unanimity on this point is not to be expected yet. 

 One swears by Jackson, another by Kinmond, others by Ansell, Barry, 

 Lyle, the inventor of the Sirocco, and so on. The machines and 

 names of inventors are many, and each has its disciples. Perhaps the 

 most favourite rolling machines are Jackson's and Kinmond 's, but we 

 see the latter has just produced what he calls a " Centrifugal Rolling 

 Machine " which he thinks will supersede all others. We have not 

 seen it, though it is at work on several gardens, and so can give no 

 opinion about it ; but another of Kinmond's machines, his Dryer, we 

 know well. It was long a moot point if Tea could be efficiently fired 

 by any other agent than charcoal. Many affirmed that the fumes of 

 charcoal were necessary ; and when, years ago, Colonel Money, so 

 well known by his writings in Tea matters, affirmed from experiments 

 that charcoal was not necessary, but that any fuel would do the work, 

 few 'believed him, for people said it was impossible to credit that the 

 Chinese would have gone on using charcoal (so much more expensive 

 than other fuel) for centuries, were it not a necessity. What Colonel 

 Money then predicted has already come to pass. Much of the Tea 

 now produced in India never sees charcoal at all, and it is very certain 

 that in two or three years all Indian Tea will be fired by machinery. 

 We say this is certain simply because, apart from the saving effected 

 by using other fuel, the value of Teas fired by machinery is increased. 

 It is natural it should be so because, by the use of the best machines 

 invented for that purpose, the heat can be regulated to a nicety, an 

 impossibility by the old mode of charcoal firing. 



Kinmond's Dryer is, in our opinion, the best Tea Dryer machine 

 yet invented. Space forbids our describing it minutely (besides, only 



