43 
system of apprenticeship, in which all the difficulties 
and disadvantages of this antiquated system of learn- 
ing are apparent. In what is now known as the 
Middle East, in India, Ceylon and Malaya, the 
young man new to the tropics, usually without any 
agricultural experience, is apprenticed as a ‘‘ creeper ’’ 
and learns the ordinary procedure of the estate whilst 
entrusted with more or less responsible duties of 
management and supervision. Many of the larger 
planting companies are beginning to recognize the in- 
adequacy of this plan of providing for the supreme 
management of estates on which from time to time arise 
problems which no amount of accumulated experience 
and judgment are competent alone to resolve. As a 
result, men are now beginning to be selected as 
assistants who have previously passed through the 
course of an agricultural college at home, and who 
have only to learn the special methods and problems of 
tropical agriculture during their career as apprentices. 
This step in selecting partially educated men is a signi- 
ficant and satisfactory advance in the right direction. 
The men thus selected have received a training in those 
sciences, such as chemistry and botany, on which the 
practice of tropical, as of temperate, agriculture depends. 
They have also gained some knowledge of general 
agricultural procedure and of estate management, all of 
which is of distinct value. They are, however, wholly 
unacquainted with tropical conditions and problems, 
and know nothing of the existing practice as regards 
the cultivation of tropical crops, whilst they are wholly 
ignorant of even the principles of the management of 
native labour, and of the routine to be followed in the 
growth of tea, rubber, coffee and cocoa and tropical 
foodstuffs. The problems and difficulties which con- 
front them in these subjects are beyond their previous 
experience and training. 
It has to be recognized that it is necessary before a 
man, even with a diploma in European agriculture, can 
take an effective part in the management of a tropical 
agricultural estate, or play any important part in im- 
proving agricultural methods and solving special 
problems, or in teaching agriculture to natives, to have 
been well trained and thoroughly well informed as to 
