3 8o 
THE TROPICAL 
AGRICULTURIST. [October i, 1881. 
tbe purpose of supplying roots to persons who may- 
wish to undertake the cultivation of this fibre. The 
prices which have on two occasions been offered for 
machines to clean rheea fibre have hitherto failed to 
create much interest in the mutter in commercial 
circles in Calcutta, and the native zemindars are for 
the most part disinclined to meddle with new and 
unfamiliar cultiva ion. For reasons stated in my last 
report., I am not however sanguine as to the possi- 
bility of rheea cultivation becoming a commercial 
success in Bengal; and I am not sure t"at the 
caution of commercial men and zemindars in this 
matter is altogether to be reprobated. 
Paper materials. -In compliance with an order of 
Government which I had hitherto been unable to carry 
out, I deputed the Curator of the garden during the 
cold weather to examine the long grasses that grow 
on the bankB of the Adjai and Damooda rivers with 
the view of testing their suitability as materials for 
paper fibre. Mr. Pant ling was absent on this duty for 
some weeks. He made a careful examination of many 
miles of the banks of both these rivers, as well as 
of those of the Brahtuaputra between Chilmurree and 
Goalundo. On all three rivers Mr. Pantling found 
the prevailing grasses to consist of the three species 
of Saccharum known as S. spontaneum, S. Sara, and 
S. fuscum, the vernacular names of which are re- 
spectively kashee, sara, and hhuree. Each of these 
grasses forms a stout reed from 5 to 10 feet high, and 
having a rather thick hard stem. This stout hard 
stem being quite unsuitable for paper-making, only 
the leaves and the leaf-sheaths can be taken into con- 
sideration. Fortunately I was able to show these 
materials to a gentleman connected with one of the 
largest firms of paper-makers in England, who came 
to India during the past cold weather for the ex- 
press purpose of finding out what can be obtained 
from India in the shape of a paper fibre. Tbe cost 
of collection and freight being taken into account, 
this gentleman's verdict was against all three fibres. 
At my request the Commissioner of Orissa was good 
enough to send me further supplies of some of the 
wiry grasses of tbe coast ; but the same objection 
holds to all these, namely, that the proportion of 
hard, useless stem is so great as to preclude them 
from consideration as practicable sources of paper 
fibre. Something has been done in Burmah in the way 
of carrying out Mr. Routledge's proposals for the util- 
ization of young bamboo shoots as a source of paper 
fibre ; but as yet no very satisfactory results have 
been arrived at. As Esparto and Alpha grasses, at 
present so largely used in the manufacture of paper, 
are rapidly becoming scarce and dear, the necessity 
of some substitute for them is daily becoming more 
pressing. My own opinion is that, of Indian fibre- ' 
producing plants, the plantain is the one which pro- 
mises best ; and I think some attention might be 
well spent on its utilization. Baobab has been proved 
to be too slow of growth, and Malaclvra capita ta, 
which has been recently suggested, does not seem to 
promise much. 
India rubber. — The Ceara rubber-trees (Manihot 
Glaziovii) continue to grow vigorously, and a few of 
them are now beginning to yield seed. The demand 
for young plants and for the seed of this species 
continues to be considerable ; and of all the recently- 
imported rubber-yielders, it is the only one that pro- 
mises any kind of success iu this part of India. The 
Para rubber (Herca) and the Madagascar rubber vine 
: Vahea) have utterly tailed. Of Urceola e'astica &nd 
Ccvtt'dloa elantica, two well-known South American 
rub er-yielders, I have not hitherto been able to get 
more than two or three sickly plants. Of the great 
rubber creeper <<f the East African Coast (a species of 
Landolphia) seeds have— thanks to the kind exertions 
of Dr. Kirk, Consul-General at Zanzibar — beqnreceived 
at the garden, and some of them have germinated. 
But I fear, even if it were to turn out to be suited 
to the climate of Calcutta, Landolphia would prove 
rather an unmanageable crop, for it is described to 
be an enormous creeper, climbing to the tops of the 
highest trees. With regard to all these exotic rub- 
bers, it must be remembered that (with the excep- 
tion of Ceara) they are either very large trees or 
climbers ; and although it may pay well to collect 
rubber from them in their native forests where they 
have grown to maturity without cost to the collector, 
it is quite a different matter when their planting and 
protection have to be paid for, and their coming to 
maturity has to be awaited for years. 
Other economic plants. — The locust bean or carob 
and the various kinds of Ei>caly/>tus, of which the 
cultivation was pressed on Government, have been 
tried for years, and have all been found totally un- 
suitable to the soil and climate of Bengal. They 
may now, I think, cease to be reported on ; so also 
maybe baobab as a fibre-yielder and Prosopis pubescens 
as a cheap source of tanning material. Mahogany and 
guango or rain-tree are two exotic trees which really 
grow well in Bengal, and for which the demand is 
^teady. Arrangements were therefore made some time 
ago for regular annual importations frum Jamaica of 
seeds of each. Last year, however, all the mahogany 
seed received from this source was quite bad. 
SANDAL-PLANTING IN MYSORE. 
(From the Indian Forest' r, July 1881.) 
Looking at planting in its two aspects — of the pro- 
duction of strong healthy nursery plants, and of 
getting these planted out so that there shall be no 
interruption of growth — sandal-planting is not an 
easy operation. The seed, a ball of soft, sticky, al- 
bumen, the size of a pea, in a fleshy fermeutible 
pericarp, is very liable to go bad ; but in ordinary- 
soil it germinates with difficulty, so much so that it 
was supposed at first that the seed required, as in 
nature, to pass through the intestines of birds or 
animals ; but here it was overlooked that a bird s 
gizzard would be certainly destructive to the seed, 
and the digestion of animals most probably so, while 
it is a matter of observation that sandal comes up 
naturally in many places where there are no animals 
to help it. It is a fact that soaking the seed for 
one or two days in a mixture of cow-dung and water 
has been found to hasten germination ; but this is 
observable in other seeds. The difficulty of getting 
sandal to germinate in the early days of forestry 
may be put down to bad seed and ignorance of the 
way to sow it. 
As soon as the young sandal has come up its 
troubles begin : at tirst, during the rains, with a 
species of rot in which the root may be observed 
attacked by a fungoid looking growth. The leaves 
turn yellow and drop off from below upwards, and 
the sandal seedling appears as a little stick with only 
tbe terminal bud left. It the attack is mild the 
plant makes fresh root growth, and the terminal bud 
new leaves ; but if not attended to, plants perish 
very rapidly in this way. I have seen a nursery of 
20,000 seedlings destroyed in ten days during heavy 
rain. The remedy is drainage. The foresters, as 
soon as the disease appears, "lift" the tile-pots, 
taking them out of the beds and standing them on one 
side, hiyh and dry, with the air playing round the 
pots. When the heavy rain is past the tile-pots go 
back into the beds. 
During the monsoon, to some extent, but more usually 
afterwards, many plants are lost from grubs eating 
the fleshy cellular portion of the tap-root. Sandal has 
a tap-root like a miniature radish, and it is attacked 
in the same manner as that and other fleshy roots. 
