REVIEW. 
Coco-nuts: the consols of the East. By H. Hamel Smith and F. A. G. Pape, 
with foreword by Sir W. H. Lever, Bt. London. Tropical Life 
Publishing Dept. 83-91, Great Titchfield Street, Oxford Street, W. 
[1912.] Pp. i-lviii+1-506. 70 illustrations. 11 shillings. 
Like practically everything else which has been published in 
English on the coconut, with the exception of the results of 
scientific studies, this book is essentially a compilation. The 
work is somewhat of a unit, and has been performed with much 
more care than was used in the preparation of the best-known 
previous compilations on the subject. Nevertheless, it does not 
bear the stamp of experience in the field so much as of industry 
in culling the recent literature in the English language. Even 
in their notes on the extracts from other writers, the authors 
have not always been fortunate. For instance, it is twice ex- 
plained that Rynchophorus ferrugineus is a small black insect. 
However, the digestion of the literature has on the whole been 
well done. The authors have been endowed with common sense 
if not intimate familiarity with the coconut, and the advice they 
give as to the selection of land and the treatment of the crop is 
uniformly good. They have evidently been in the closest touch 
with manufacturers of coconut products and of apparatus and 
machinery incidental to the coconut business, and this side of 
the work is accordingly very full. There are also chapters and 
digressions on health and sanitation in the Tropics which are not 
without value to the older resident and should be useful indeed 
to the emigrant. 
The most unfortunate feature of the book is the lack of 
attention to works published in French, German, and Dutch. 
Prudhomme’s monograph on the coconut, which still remains 
decidedly the finest work on the subject in any tongue, seems 
not even to be mentioned. 
Ido 1B, 
421 
