112 COFFEE CULTIVATION AND MANURING. 
health as you see me in now, but it must all be ap- 
plied on the surface. 
Master :— Would not the heavy rains wash it away, 
and would it not be better to make a hole near your~ 
roots to put the mixture in to prevent it being washed 
away from you? 
TREE :—Make no holes. If you do, you cut our 
feeding roots, which are all on the surface. Look at 
those thread-like things you see covering the 
whole of the surface near your feet; there are milli- 
ons of them, and every one of them is a mouth, and 
you destroy one of our mouths, in every one you 
cut off in any wey. Besides that, if the mixture is 
laid on the surface, our leaves get a share as well as 
our roots. 
Master :—Ah yes: I suppose your roots turn the 
substance of the mixture into sap, and soit is carried 
to your leaves. 
TREE :—Not so, but every night after dark there 
is an exhalation takes place, and our leaves have 
mouths to take that in, and they delight in the effiu- 
via from such mixtures as I have instructed you to 
make. 
Master :—This is something new, and I candidly 
confess that I don’t -quite understand all you have 
told me yet, but I will try to do so. 
TREE :—You have learned men amongst you, one 
in particular, who has taken a great deal of pains to 
understand the nature of all insects which give us 
trouble. Could you not get one like him to turn 
his attention to the study of the coffee tree. There 
are a few who have written a great deal about us, 
but they do not act yet like people who understand 
their business. I will tell you how to begin the study. 
Take out your knife and stir the earth about here, 
and you will find, as I told you before, millions_of 
small thread-like roots, and tell me, you who are so 
fond of making holes for my food, why all those 
mouths are right on the surface, and not lower in the 
ground ? 
Master :—Really and truly I don’t pretend to un- 
derstand why your roots are all on the surface, and 
to tell you the truth, I know nothing of your nature, 
except what you have told yourself; but there is a 
learned man at this present advocating the cutting of 
your roots with a sharp knife all round to make you 
give more fruit, and he says that fruit trees are served 
in this way in Europe, to make them give more fruit. 
TREE :— 1 strongly suspect that whoever advocates 
such a ruinous system has not sufficiently studied 
our nature; it is true that trees in Hurope have their 
tap-roots cut to make them bear fruit, but that has 
