Samoa and New Guinea 135 



exceptional circumstances a fully matured 

 estate without gaps will yield after the fifteenth 

 year up to one ton of copra to the hectare. 

 These are exceptions and do not take into 

 account droughts, &c., and it must be taken 

 for granted that about every third or fourth 

 year poor copra crops will ensue. In a 

 country like Samoa, when there were no pests, 

 one would have thought that gaps in plantations 

 would not occur, but from one cause or 

 another it is impossible to find a single estate 

 without failures, and this is not to be wondered 

 at, as trees die from many reasons besides 

 pests. The cattle are still the principal 

 offenders in young plantations, where they eat 

 the young leaves greedily, causing the death 

 of the trees. It is therefore necessary to sur- 

 round them with fencing or a rough wall. 

 The latter is -costly and cannot be carried out 

 en masse, and in any case 2 to 3 per cent, of 

 the gaps can be put down, even on the best 

 plantations, to natural causes, for it must be 

 remembered that damage is constantly being 

 done even to the full-grown trees by lightning 

 and storms, &c. In Samoa the average yield 

 of a full-grown palm is sixty nuts per annum, 

 the nuts being of medium size. The meat 

 is fairly thick, but it takes about 6,000 nuts to 

 make one ton of dry copra (or nearly three nuts 

 to the pound), although there are some localities 

 where the size of the nuts admits of the making 

 of one ton of copra from only 4,000 nuts. It 



