Mr. George S. Hudson 159 
it compels the thief to keep the cacao he has 
stolen in his possession twenty-four to thirty- 
six hours, and this frequently proves his 
undoing. The usual procedure of a small 
proprietor having cacao for sale to a merchant 
is to ‘‘sweat” it one night (which entails no 
rise in temperature, and is merely equivalent 
to a draining process), expose it to one day’s 
sun when it is bagged, and next day, perhaps, 
slightly sprinkled with water to make it weigh 
a little more, it is then sold to the merchant. 
In other cases the drying is continued until it 
is more or less “dry” in the accepted term 
(generally less), and the produce then sold to 
the merchant, who exports it in this condition 
as cured cacao. It is then, usually, very un- 
attractive, of a dirty grey colour, insufficiently 
dried, more or less mildewed, and containing 
much of the placenta from the pod. Small 
wonder that it sells at a low price, one is 
only surprised that it does not fetch an even 
lower figure. In some cacao-buying stores an 
attempt is made to produce fermentation on 
the partially dried bought cacao, by throwing 
it as purchased into large packing cases, and 
leaving it there for a night or two to take 
its chance of fermentation. Its chance is in- 
finitely small; such fermenting germs as the 
cacao carried away from its brief sojourn in 
the ‘‘sweating-box” are killed by the sunning, 
and as one seldom sees the ‘Cacao Fly” 
(described by Dr. Nicholls) in well-scavenged 
