6io 
THE TROPICAL AGRICULTURIST. [March i, 1889. 
at the wonderful growth in six to ten years of jak trees 
scattered over Eilandhu, I believe, that better even 
than coconuts as an inheritance for my family would 
have been 100 acres of jak trees, planted when I 
began clearing about 8x8. This valuable tree yields 
not only fruit but forage for animals, while for general 
purposes of house- and boat-building and furniture it 
produces our most useful timber, — timber which is 
becoming scarce and dear ; for the natives, naturally 
enough, object to cutting down a jak tree until it 
is beyond the fruit-bearing stage. Any young man, 
able and willing to wait ten to fifteen years for 
returns, would, I believe, do well, with a couple 
of hundreds of acres of jak, wa and lunumidella trees 
in the lowcountry and a similar or larger extent 
of Australian eucalypts, acacias and grevilleas in 
the higher mountain altitudes. Our danger now 
from tea is the very rapidity with which it yields re- 
turns. The region I visited yesterday, although 
it grows many products, from the mighty talipot 
palm to the minute-grained amu of the millet 
field, is, par excellence, the region of coconuts ; 
and my neighbour of " Comillah " (a reminiscence 
of Eastern Bengal, near where the head-hunting 
aborigines are now giving trouble) is the happy 
possessor of some hundreds of acres rapidly 
advancing to the age of full bearing. But we were 
naturally more interested in his plants and trees 
imported from India. A very fine mahogany which 
flourishes in the bungalow grounds proves that the 
climate and soil are suitable for this prince of 
timber-yielding trees. Our readers know that Sylhet 
oranges have been here a great success, although 
Dr. Stork has discovered that the success would 
have been more pronounced .had the holes for the 
plants been deeper and wider. Ground for orange 
orchards indeed should be trenched 4 feet deep. 
Lichee plants flourish exceedingly, but do not fruit. 
The loquats and lichees are indeed not successes 
generally in Ceylon. Experiments were being tried 
with half-a-dozen varieties of cotton. The poorest 
wool is the short- stapled Tinnevelly kind ; 
New Orleans is good, but the best of all, in 
Dr. Stork's experience, is what he introduced 
from India as Fiji cotton. It looks like what we 
used to call Pernambuco cotton in Jaffna, where 
we reckoned Bourbon cotton the best. One great 
point seems to be to hit on the proper seasons 
for sowing the seed. The difficulty in Jaffna about 
47 years ago was that the boles ripened, so that 
the cotton was battered by the rains of the 
north-east monsoon. The yield per acre, too, was 
small. I sincerely trust the experiments now 
making will be more successful than those of the 
Messrs. Whitehouse and Hardy were in 1842-43. 
There was an insect enemy in the shape of a 
little reddish beetle. There was then no local de- 
mand, except for the native looms, which were 
largely supplied with imported thread. 
The success of cotton cultivation on a large 
scale in Ceylon would have the subsidiary advan- 
tage of securing a plentiful supply of good cattle feed 
in the shape of the seed. Some of the cotton 
wool produced and prepared at Comillah was utilized 
in an unexpected manner by a " tailor bird, " which 
had sewn (actually stitched) large croton leaves to- 
gether, putting the cotton wool inside for a soft warm 
nest in which an egg had been laid. We made 
closer acquaintance with a weaver bird, one of 
those that build long pendulous nests which they 
enter from below. One of these birds which had 
been caught young was amongst the numerous 
pets of the household, hopping about the drawing- 
room table with the utmost confidence and 
instinctively attempting to abstract pieces of 
thread and cloth from a lady's workbasket. Still 
tamer and more confident were several dear little 
"paddy birds" which stood fearlessly on the 
outstretched fingers even of the stranger guests. 
This beautiful sight (the tameness of the birds 
was not shocking to me as it was to Alexander 
Selkirk) was the more pleasant, because on my 
own place war had been declared against and 
death, by means of a shot gun, dealt amongst 
some of " the tribes on our frontier " iu 
the shape of crows and squirrels. Their 
crime was a raid on our fine large pineapples 
growing on plants the progeny of some originally 
introduced by Dr. Stork. The crows peck at the 
pineapples as they do at everything else, and 
although Corvus impudens is a good scavenger, we 
did not mourn so much over bis kind as over the 
dead specimens of the lively " little mime and 
thief" immortalized by Miss Jewsberry. This long- 
tailed, active, vocal, arboreal rodent is, we know, 
omnivorous, for we saw specimens eating white-ants 
with gusto. That fact did not prejudice us against 
them. But what could we say when it was proved 
to us by the marks of their claws that they had 
scooped out and eaten the interiors of some of our 
best pineapples, leaving only the deceptive shell in- 
tact ? We did not, in view of scooped out 
pineapples, intercede for the squirrels any more 
than we did for the crows, but that animal nature 
should be as depraved as human (men thieves have 
carried off pineapples bodily) " gave us pause." Of 
this I will take advantage to close these discursive 
notes, after bearing a tribute to the little bullock hack- 
eries which convey us seven miles from the station to 
Eilandhu in two hours, and expressing the hope 
that if there is a new railway time-table it will 
embrace the stopping of the express train at 
Henaratgoda. There are many coconut estates 
in the neighbourhood, but above all there are the 
Tropical Gardens of Government, which many 
would like to visit if railway arrangements permitted. 
The change in Eilandhu factory by the sub- 
stitution of a handsome sirocco for chulas was 
pleasant to the eye as well as to the sense of 
feeling. The heat previously was almost unbear- 
able. The two sets of trays were doing good 
work, the coolies being on a level with the top 
part of the machinery, which was sunk in a well- 
made pit. The thermometer attached to the sirocco 
indicated 230 degrees, which an experienced com- 
panion said was, in his opinion, too high by 10 
degrees. This planter had appreciated Brown's 
Desiccator by supplying his own factory with one. 
"But," he said, " it needs power to work the fan, 
and the reason why so much fuel is burnt in the 
sirocco and the internal parts destroyed is, that 
planters heat it up to 270. The proper figure is 
220 degrees." I think it right to record this opinion. 
N. B. — Offers for pepper in store (a few bushels) 
have gone up from B7 to B12J per bushel. 
Surely even this latter figure is low for a condi- 
ment so usef ul and so generally used ? 2nd 2V. B. — 
That native carpenters are at work near the 
Henaratgoda station turning out hal tea boxes 
at prices lower than those sold in Col- 
ombo, whether locally made or imported. It 
will be curious if Sinhalese carpenters, with 
hand saws, chisels and adzes, are able successfully 
to compete with American machinery applied to 
the forests of Japan. The circumstances must be 
favourable to enable them to do so. F. 
<► 
CINNAMON CROPS IN THE NEGOMBO 
DISTRICT. 
Kadirana, ' 8th Feb. — Very dry here : no rain 
since the 8th of last month. The " bud" with 
blossom, which began to show about the middle of 
