536 



appeared on the untapped bark, but last year and this year it was 

 appearing on the renewed bark. Mr. Petch did not seem to think that 

 it would interfere with the tree further than making the bark rough 

 where the canker had been. The importance of this roughening, he 

 seemed to think, was serious, and in time it would be necessary to 

 invent another system of tapping. He would be inclined to recom- 

 mend the cutting out of the diseased bark and sterilising the tapping 

 knife, as the knives would carry the infection from one tree to 

 another. The tools could be disinfected by dipping them in a one-in 

 a-hundred parts of Corrosive sublimate- 



The roughening of the bark due to the canker must be 

 extraordinary if it is so great as to interfere with the tapping so 

 seriously as Mr. Petch states. Many of the old trees in the Botanic 

 Gardens in Singapore have very rough bark even where they have 

 not been tapped, others have been irregularly hacked about in course 

 of various experiments and the bark is raised and lumpy, some 

 again have a regularly undulating surface, yet we have had no 

 difficulty in tapping these trees, and make something better than 

 scrap from them. It is not at all probable that trees after say 10 or 15 

 years tapping will have beautifully smooth bark, like that we see in 

 the young trees. This cannot be expected, but there need be little 

 fear but that the trees will still be easily tapped, and if this 

 roughening of the bark is all that "canker" does for the tree, it 

 need not be much dreaded. 



PROLIFIC COCONUTS. 



Mr. E. B. Copeland, Dean of the College of Agriculture of 

 the Philippines, writes apropos of the prolific coconut which figured 

 lately in the Bulletin, and says: — "The Moro Plantation and 

 Development Company has a tree near Zamboanga, from which 106 

 nuts were taken at one cutting, and 112 two months later. I saw the 

 tree less than two months later still, and it seemed to have fully a 

 hundred nuts ready to harvest again. It looked like the tree in your 

 picture, except that it was older and taller." 



