2o6 
THF. TROPICAL AG 
RICULTURIST. [September i, 1888 
TOON TEEES AND INSECT PESTS. 
Gedrela toona is a special favourite of ours amongst 
timber trees, as it well deserves to be from its straight 
clean stem, its peculiarly handsome red-coloured 
foliage, and the quality of its timber, resembling 
and not much inferior to mahogany. It grows 
in time to an enormous girth, and Gamble describes 
it as generally a quick grower. That is our own 
experience, as recently recorded, in the case of a 
grove of young and flourishing trees on a piece of 
land near the bund at Nuwara Eliya. The rate 
of growth of the trees here in less than two years 
has been most satisfactory, while less than half- 
a-dozen out of several hundreds have suffered 
in broken tops from wind. They have been attacked 
neither by insects nor animals, which cannot be 
said of their companion tree, Oryptomeria japonica 
The tender tops of these have been eaten off from 
their infancy onwards. We have blamed rats and 
hares, but we suspect the chief culprits are stray 
cattle. The tops of our "red cedar" trees are 
now almost all beyond the reach of cattle, even if 
the latter affected them, which they do not. A gentle- 
man for whose opinion generally we have much res- 
pect, has recently attempted to shake our faith in 
toons by asserting that although they grow rapidly 
when young they subsequently hang fire and that 
they are liable to attacks from boring beetles. 
Owing to this latter cause, he stated, Mr. George 
Beck of Henfold, Dimbula, was extirpating some 
toons which he had grown; This was the second 
case we had heard of, the first being in regard to 
toon trees grown on Loolecondera. But this place 
and Henfold are each fully 1,500 feet lower in 
altitude than the scene of our experiment, and we 
have never heard of insects attacking this tree at 
Darjiling or other parts of the Himalayas, on the 
Nilgiris or in Java. Balfour and Gamble say not 
one word about insect attacks, but they notice 
properties in the wood and bark specially inimical 
to insects. Accordingly, we are glad to find, on refer- 
ence to Dr. Trimen (who kindly permits us to pub- 
lish his reply to our inquiries), that the inseots which 
do occasionally attack toon trees in Oeylon are 
not timber borers, but merely leaf-eating cater- 
pillars, of little account. Dr. Triraen's interesting 
statement is in the following terms : — 
" The little borer which occasionally attacks the 
toon is not a very serious pest, and scarcely affords 
as ufBcieut reason for cutting down the trees. It is 
not a beetle-larva, but the little caterpillar of a small 
moth, and is scarcely deserving of the name of ' borer,' 
as it does not live in the wood of the tree, but in the 
extreme twigs when young and green, in fact im- 
mediately after they are put forth. It has attacked 
a few trees in Peradeniya, and I know was trouble- 
some some years ago at Loolecondera, but is by no 
means general or even common. It has nothing 
whatever to do with the borer of coffee and other 
trees, and there is no likelihood of its spreading to 
them. It is, however, very partial to the mahogany, 
a close relation to the toon, and many of our trees 
in Peradeniya have been much checked in growth by 
it, -i annual attacks. The effect is indeed very curious; 
i In: repeated destruction of the terminal twigs causes 
the continuous production of lateral ones on the 
branehlets below, so that the character of the tree 
bi icomes at last quite altered, and a dense, round, much- 
branched head results, ] instead of the usual wide- 
spreading foliage. Probably a somewhat similar change 
would occur in the toon trees, but that is the worst 
that would happen." 
This is reassuring, and we retain our belief in 
C'edrela toona, the grand " red cedar " of Queens- 
land (whence slabs 8 feet wide have been ob- 
tained of fine quality timber), and the whole 
1 1 im.ilayan and other elevated regions of India, 
as one of the most desirable trees to grow at high 
altitudes in Ceylon. The trees can be planted 
very close, can be gradually thinned out, and when 
mature individuals are finally cut down, they coppice 
as readily as does that other valuable timber tree, 
the teak, which ought to receive special attention 
in the moist lowcountry of Ceylon. In the dry 
and arid portions of the lowcountry, tha satinwood, 
halmilla, tamarind and palu grow well, and on the 
banks of the rivers the huge kumbuk. But the 
tree to be specially cultivated in the dry and arid 
zones is the palmyra palm, good for fence, thatch 
and native book leaves, sugar, fruits and timber. 

Flowering of Eucalyptus Globulus. — There is now 
in the garden of Beaconudl House, Exmouth, Devon, 
a tree of Eucalyptus glo'oulu-, which n a few days 
will be a beautiful sigut — at present there are some 
hunlreds of flowers open and a large number of buds 
are about to expand. T .e height of the tree is aboir. 
30 feat, aud at (J feet from the ground, measures 
24 inches iu circumference. It was plauteJ about 
seven years ago. Does not such a specimen speak 
well for our mild climate? — W. J. G. — Gardeners' 
Chronicle. 
A new Sugar-making agent.— Sugar-^rowrs in 
Demerara have been much excited of late in conse- 
quence of the successful use of coconut oil as a 
sugar-making ageat. The addition to the pan prior 
to striking, of about a pint of the oil to the ton of 
sugar produces an enormously increased return of 
sugar from the masicuite. The sugar made wkli the 
oil contains not a trace ot the odour peculiar to it. 
When in addition to this, cheapness of the agent, 
and the simplicity of its application are taken into 
account, it seems certain that the new process is 
bound to come into general use. — Indian Agricult" rt*t. 
Gutta Percha.— The ;,'utta obtained from the Abys- 
sinian trees, Mimusops Schimperi andjJ/. K annuel, ilochot, 
has been examined by Me^s. Heckel aid Schlagden- 
hauffen, who find that it contains 4820 per cent, of 
gutta, 42 80 per cent of an amorphous resin, produced 
apparently by the oxidation of albane, and 9-80 per 
cent of inorganic salts. The crude article is e'astic 
and adhesive, and ow.-s its g lut.nous character to the 
resin. The authors also examined the product of a 
species of Payena from the Sunda Isles, which yielded 
about 30 per cent of caoutchouc, and a crystalline and 
an amorphous resin. The authors conclude that 
neither of these products are available for technical 
purposes in the pure state, but may be useful for mix- 
ing with other varieties of gutta (Compt. Rend., cvi„ 
p. 1625). — Pharmaceutical Journal. 
Farming in Western Australia.— Mr. H. 
Stooehewer Cooper, a well-known writer on the 
Colonies, writing to the Sydney Mail, gives a stri- 
king picture of the reckless way in which farm- 
ing has hitherto been carried on in Western Aus- 
tralia : — 
To show your readers what sort of farming has beeu 
carried on here in years gone by, I will just give a case : 
—Not far from this pretty little town of Albany, where 
I am writing, a man has a farm of about 70 acres, and 
he has farmed it for 22 years. In all that time he 
has never put an ounce "of manure on his fields, and 
he has never ploughed more thau 4^in. deep. Tbe 
average of his wheat return has been 25 to 28 bushels 
per acre, and of barley 45 to 50 bushels. But the 
apathetic indolence and indifference to modern ways 
of doing things surpass all belief. Only a few days 
ago a correspondent of a Perth paper says that some 
of the farmers of the rich Greenough Valley refuse 
manure if offered to them, although they have been 
pottering on in the same miserable fashion, imported, 
I fear, from the " distressful country," for some 15 
years, are heavily in debt to the storekeepers, and do 
next to nothing with soil which the ordinary En- 
glish or Scotch farmer would make a fortune with. 
These things and many like them make people who 
wish for the progress of West Australia cry aloud fur 
new blood — men with brains as well as money to turn 
a land capable of great things to account. 
