3 63 
THE TROPICAL AGRICULTURIST. [December r, 1888. 
iu quills, broken quills aud chips, 13 to 88 cents ( — 2|d 
to Is 4il. per )b,) ; and ditto root, from 38 to 75 cents 
(— 7d to Is. ljsd per lb.) The principal buyers were the 
Amsterdam Quinine Works and the Brunswick Factory. 
Of the 121 tons manufacturers' bark b:}- tons coDtain 
an average of 1 to 2 per ceut. ; 19;} tons, 2 to 3 per; 
cent.; 37 tons, 3 to 4 per cent. ; 2b tons, 4 to 5 per cent. 
IUj tons, 5 to 6 per cent. ; 15j tons, b to 7 per cent. ; 
(ij tons, 7 to 8 per ceut. quiuine sulphate. — Chemist and 
Drugyist. 
COCONUT PLANTING NOTE. 
(By an Old Planter.) 
MANURING UNDER DIFFERENT SYSTEMS — PRACTICE AND 
THEORY. 
The writer who defines manuring as restoring to 
the soil the elements removed from it in the crops it 
produces, who would regulate the supply as exactly as 
possible to the same quantity as has been so removed, 
and who objects to giving any mauure whatever to the 
laud occupied by a perennial plant till it has removed 
some of the natural fertility of the soil, may possibly 
keep up by such treatment a tolerably equal cropping 
from year to year, only affected by the character of 
the seasons. This view was set forth in the case of 
coconut cultivation, and really amounts to this. No 
matter what the quality of the soil may be, your you: g 
plant should have no assistance from manure, til) 
after it has produced a crop, and after that, just so 
much as will enable it to yield another crop of precisely 
the same weight as.the first. 
There are other planters, who take a commercial 
view of a system of manuring : they ascertain by ex- 
periment — Newton's plan against Kepler's — the effects 
of a given value of manure on young, half-grown, and 
mature trees. If they find that 2 cents worth of 
manure annually will bring a young tree into flower 
iu six years, that would without such aid have 
taken ten, they will be apt to hold that a gain of four 
years is an abundant return ^for 25 cents, half in 
manure, and half in labour. Again if they take a 
mature tree, that has been bearing 25 nuts per 
annum, and spend 25 cents in digging and manu- 
ring the laud it occupies, with the result of a crop 
of 50 nuts in the second year after the application, 
aud the promise of an equal return in the third, 
they will hardly be deterred, from playing so pro- 
fitable a game by the fear of reducing the tree to a 
" semi-artificial existence. " They will probably say 
that they infinitely prefer a semi-artificial tree that 
bears 50 nuts to an altogether natural one that 
bears 25. Hurrah then for the somi-artificial coconut 
tree ! 
It has been written, that, so far as the writer's 
knowledge goes, roots are not endowed with more 
than rational discrimination, but take up as much 
fertilizing matter as they are able to. There are plants, 
whofo chief base is potash, others whose chief base 
is lime, plants may be growing in soil where 
the baBe they most require is deficient, while 
the other is abundant, yet iu no case 
is a plant untrue to its species, the one will not 
take up lime, to supply a deficiency of potash, and 
vice versa. If we deny to plants, the super-rational 
discrimination of selecting their specific aliments in 
unvarying proportions, how are we to accouut for 
those unvarying proportions and the total absence of 
certain elements contained in the solution, from 
which they derive their supplies? We must either 
accept this power of discrimination in the roots, or 
else fall back on the old theory of excremental dis- 
charges into the soil, which after all would only be 
transferring the discriminating power to some other 
organs. 
Mauue Headrigg held the setting-up of a winnow- 
ing machine a tempting of Providence, it being in 
her view a Christian duty to wait for a dispensa- 
tion of wind on the shelling hill. In like manner 
a Jlchridicn farmer called the provision of collars 
nun tracs for working cattle a settin g up of carnal 
bum. li inventions, in opposition to the decroes of 
God Almighty who had supplied tho auimuls with 
bad to tie the plough to. 
Those good Christians believed they were serv- 
ing God in opposing with all their little might 
profane innovations, but there is such a thing 
as fanaticism outside of religious bigotry, 
and such is the fallacy born of presumption, 
and nursed in the lap of ignorance, that the 
young coconut plant should in no case have its growth 
advanced by artificial means, leave as many impedi- 
ments in its way, as suits your laziness, but on no 
account break up the soil it occupies ; on no accouut 
add the elements its constitution requires, else you 
will have cause to repent of meddling with nature's 
institution. There is no very clear explanation of the 
nature and extent of the calamity that will befall 
the rash innovator, but the rapid exhaustion aud final 
death of his trees is clearly enough indicated. He 
has been told that though he himself may profit by 
the forcing system, his heirs will be robbed of their 
inheritance — a terrible calamity indeed, for the after 
comers, who must take realized rupees instead of 
the fluctuating but always diminishing income de- 
rived from a neglected coconut field. He is told that 
his views are impracticable by people who never tried 
whether they were practical or not. Of course the 
critic who thus denounces the unpractical theorist 
never heurd that the same theorist took in hand 
a mature coconut field over twenty years old, and 
in ten years by annual increments raised the crop one 
hundred and fifty per cent; he never saw, perhaps 
would not believe if he did see, the" result 
of 18 cents worth of bone dust and 9 cents of 
labour on a seven year old tree at the end of two 
years. He might see a great head of thirty green leaves, 
a crop of 120 nuts, and astern running up so rapidly, 
that there is a space of ten feet between the lowest 
bunch of nuts and the highest flower, and all this be- 
fore a single ripe nut has been gathered. Can the critic 
tell at what period the reaction is likely to set in or if 
there is no possible resource by which it maybe averted p 
The sole objective point of all agricultural operations 
is to get as much as possible out of the land in crops, 
but self-satisfied ignorance will waste labour with small 
effect, or if of a specially economical turn of mind he 
asserts that his field needs no labour, and he gives it 
none ; that manure spoils his trees and he religiously 
refraius from thatfolly, or if he do admit that manure 
promotes crop, he proceeds to adminster it in the 
most slovenly and wasteful manner that shiftless 
laziness ever invented. He looks moreover with the 
contempt of superior intelligence on the man who 
ventures a step beyond his own practice and 
if results follow that repay the expenditure four- 
folds, he says : " Wait and see what will happen to 
the trees that have been forced into unnatural pro- 
ductiveness." He is well assured that the day will 
come, aud at no distant time when they will become 
utterly barren, — barren beyond the power of manure 
aud manipulation to remedy. True he has not seen 
the end, but he has an inner consciousness, an infalli- 
ble instinct, that assures him it must be so. 
The innovating experimentalist will go on, endea- 
vouring to take out of his laud as much as his cultiva- 
ted plant can take, and he will not confine his grati- 
tude to restoring in auother form exactly what he 
has taken out of the land, but will keep mending the 
price so long, as he finds the trausaction commercially 
profitable, and if iu the mean time he partially fails, 
it will be from lack of means aud not from lack of 
will to give his trees the best chauce of making an 
ample return. 
It is a lame definition of manuring to say it is 
merely restoring to the land the fertilizing matter the 
plant has abstracted ; this indeed will keep the land up 
to the same measure of fertility that it possesed when 
first taken in hand, but there is no necessity that it 
should stop at this point. The wheat lands of England 
give an average yield of 28 bushels per acre, which is 
more than twice as much as they yielded a hun- 
dred years ago ; the increase being due to improved 
husbandry, aud more fertilizing matter put into the 
soil. When coconut cultivation is better understood 
and more skilfully practised, a time will come, 
— Ceylonese conservatism, and guides with a littJe 
knowledge notwithstanding, when four candies of copra 
