162 COFFEE PLANTING IN NATAL. 
classes of animals pick the coffee so and leave the 
parchment in heaps in this country, and what is 
worst the rogues can never be apprehended. 
Nursery plants cost £4 13s 8d per 1,000; formerl 
they cost £7 10:. This is a frightful price, and iy 
is quite time each estate in Natal had its own nurseryt 
for at this rate an estate of 200 acres would cost, 
about £1,000 for plants ! 
Holing.—40 to 60 per day of holes 3 feet in dia- 
meter by 18 inches deep would gladden the heart of 
a Ceylon planter. We are obliged to put up with 
much less; very probably the Natal soil is softer 
than ours. 
Planting distance.—i7, 8, and 10 feet are all very wide. 
But they grow cotton between, which must be a doubt- 
ful benefit. 
Jamaica picking is instanced as costing on an aver- 
age ls per bushel. We cousider 6d high and certainly 
could not afford 1s. At Rio pickers have to go and 
bring in their day’s work in a bag probably 1 to 2 
bushels. Natal picking is cheap-—chietly done by wo- 
men, girls and boys at 6d per day. But we cannot 
exactly reconcile this low rate of wages with the in- 
timation that kafirs who are extolled as models of 
tractability, are so uncertain that the planters are 
obliged to import Indian labour which costs about 
28s per month. Perhaps this is a work, however, 
for which the kafir women and children have a pre- 
dilection, and therefore turn out to it—only if they 
do not, and if the 28s labour has to be had recourse 
to, the above figure will not answer. 
Calculations of an estate coming into bearing with 
- maiden crop of 2 cwts. the third year, and afterwards 
giving 7 cwts. per acre annually for a new and com- 
paratively untried district lke Natal, out of the trop- 
ics too, are evidently speculative as the author nowhere 
says that such crops have been realized. But if he is 
sure that they can be borne out, it shews _ coffee 
planting in Natal to be a very paying investment. 
Strange however as it may seem in the face of this 
statement, several Ceylon planters who have gone 
there to settle have not found their expectations 
realized. On the waole while the pamphlet contains 
nothing that is new, it contains a good deal that is 
true and will prove a useful handbook to a beginner, 
THE PREPARATION OF COFFEE. 
The preparation of coffee is at present so interest- 
ing a subject to the trade that we reproduce below 
some remarks published by Baron Liebig a few years 
ago on the subject ;— 
