198 
THE TROPICAL AGRICULTURIST. [September i, 1888. 
decide. It is consequently apparent that, to some 
extent, blenders can work their own sweet wills 
unchecked by the fear of consequences. 
But, after all, it may be that we can — as 
our London correspondent suggests in the course 
of his remarks upon this topic— rely upon the 
educated taste of the Home public to insure 
that by far the larger demand by them for Oeylon 
teas will be for the true stuff, unspoilt by any 
blending, however skilfully made, with teas 
grown in other countries. To satisfy that taste 
will not in future be difficult. The steps now being 
adopted must soon insure that the consumer who 
asks for Ceylon tea, and Ceylon tea alone and 
unblended, will be certain of being served with the 
genuine article. Once a palate has become ac- 
customed to the flavour of our teas in their 
purity, it cannot fail to rapidly detect any foreign 
admixture ; and the retailers will speedily become 
aware that a continuance to serve blended teas to 
their customers can only result in their losing them. 
There is, at best, an element of uncertainty about 
a successful result to prosecutions under the 
Merchandise Marks Act, and this must make it a 
subject for congratulation if the end that it is 
desired to attain, can be achieved without incur- 
ring the risk of pecuniary loss which would 
attend a failure in any such case of prosecution. 
Both the Associations we have referred to, therefore, 
may be well satisfied if one of their primary 
objects can be secured without involving expendi- 
ture beyond the mere cost of sending a lawyer's 
letter. When the home consumer finds he can 
be certain of his purchase of pure Ceylon tea, we 
may predict that the blends will be out of it. 
They will die of inanition for want of patronage. 
THE EFFECTS OF THE DBOUGHT IN THE 
LOWCOUNTBY OF CEYLON: 
Coconuts — Pepper — &c. 
Having just returned from a day's trip into 
the Siyane Korale, about seven miles to the south 
of the Henara'goda station, I can endorse the 
correctness of the account which reached you from 
Hapitigam Korale of the effect of repeated and 
prolonged droughts on the coconut palms. Most 
of our way (three of us travelled grandly from 
the station each in a bullock hackery) we passed 
through groves of this tree, most of which have 
superseded primitive or chena jungle (chiefly the 
latter) within the past couple of decades, and I 
could not help attracting the attention of my 
companions to the signals of distress exhibited by 
the palms. It would be more correct perhaps to 
say the proportion of the trees which had "laid 
down their arms" exhausted in the unequal com- 
bat with two successive and severe droughts in 
little more than six months. One is prepared to 
see, in due course, a considerable proportion of 
withered branches hanging point downwards by 
the sides of the trunks, before their hold on the 
trees is loosened and they fall to the ground. 
But what attracted my special attention on this 
occasion was the very large proportion of green- 
hued branches which pointed to the earth instead 
of to the zenith or the horizon. When the weather 
is normally moist, the sight of half-a-dozen or 
more green leaves of a coco palm hanging down 
the side of a trunk reveals the presence of the 
fatal beetle and its devouring grubs in the soft 
heart of the tree. But, knowing as we did of the 
second serious drought of this year through which 
the unfortunate trees had just passed, the sug- 
gestion of beetles was not needed to account for 
the distress shown by a large minority if not a 
majority of the trees. It is in very rare oases 
indeed that the floor of a coconut tope is a model of 
tidiness. On one place, it is true, during our journey, 
we saw heaps of branches, undergrowth and 
weeds gathered up at intervals and in the 
process of being burnt. But as a general rule 
where the branches or rather huge leaves fall 
from coconut palms there they lie, and where the 
husks are separated from the nuts there also the 
accumulated heaps are allowed to pass into decom- 
position. The effect is better in a mauurial than in 
an festhetical point of view. No coir seems 
to be cleaned in this region. During the 
first half of our journey it seemed to us that the 
poor soil, some of it approaching "cinnamon sand " 
in colour, aggravated the effects of the successive 
droughts on the rather stunted-looking trees. 
As we approached near the fourth mile south- 
wards from the Henaratgoda station, the huge 
sentinel rock of a series,— the remains, I believe, 
of a high ridge which once connected Adam's Peak 
and Negombo, — the tropical gardens being on a 
portion of it, —there was a marked improvement 
in the appearance of the soil (decomposed granitic 
gneiss darkened by humus, or reddened by iron), 
and a corresponding change for the better in the 
appearance of the vegetation. But why will so 
many of the natives persist in a style of culti- 
vation, — 200 to 300 coconut palms to an acre, in- 
stead of 70 or 80, — which results for many years in 
the minimum yield of fruit ? In a good many 
gardens very thickly planted with coconuts, arecas 
were still more closely planted between. Here the 
aesthetic effect was excellent ; the tall, slim, perfectly 
straight-growing areca palms with their crowns of 
dense foliage contrasting strikingly with the never 
straight and generally much bent stems of the 
coconut palms with their wealth of large feathery 
leaves. A few grand talipot palms interspersed 
added to the effect, contrasting curiously with the 
euphorbias and flowering grasses growing on the 
rocks. The Sinhalese are, as a rule, a shrewd people, 
and therefore the dense groves which generally occur 
near dwellings may be a matter of calculation. The 
natives may deliberately count on the gradual dying 
out of weakly trees and on a constant 
succession of palms which bear some nuts, 
compensating for fewer trees bearing many nuts 
each ? The natives also value the cool shade and 
perhaps the fallen leaves as firewood ? Knowing 
who your Hapitigam Korale correspondent is, 1 am 
somewhat surprised at his even seeming to favour 
large estimates of nuts per tree per annum. He talks 
of 60, and no douot a good many trees in good, well- 
cultivated soil would bear this number while in their 
prime. But he and I have often agreed on 
30 to 40 and nearer 30 than 40 being a 
general average for coconut palms as usually grown. 
Your correspondent alludes to the instinct which 
leads the coconut palm to discard superfluous 
germs and even throw off well- grown nuts which 
the tree finds it cannot, with safety to its own exis- 
tence, mature. But he might have added that the 
thinning process is aided and accelerated by ex- 
ternal agencies, such as rats, squirrels, &o. It is 
sorely trying to the owner of a coconut property 
to see strewed beneath his trees fine nuts in all 
stages of growth with a hole eaten into 
each. In one case in our own experience 
the culprit was taken in flagrante delicto, 
a nut falling down with the snout of the rat 
in the hole which the thieving rodent had bored 
and eaten into. That rat can be beheld in the 
Colombo Museum unto this day, a warning to 
over-greedy feeders. The shock of the fall was 
fatal to the arboreal thief. From a very interes- 
ting monograph on the coconut palm by Dr. Shortt, 
retired Surgeon-General, Madras, well illustrated, 
we extract as follows; — 
