494 
THE TROPICAL AGRICULTURIST. [Jan. i, 1895. 
Our present style of package holds its own against 
those from India, and I do not see how they can 
be made better in the way Mr. Webster advises, 
to catch the American market. 
We cannot compete with China and Japan with 
that thin, tough wood they use, nor can we paste 
them all over with that fine rice paper they use 
and ornament them in the way they do. The cheap- 
ness of labour in China and the aptitude of the 
Chinaman in everything belonging to paper lacquering 
and preparing tea chests, the results of hundreds of 
years' practice, render them unequalled. For hun- 
dreds of years they made all their tea lead and I 
have heard of a family in England who rose to 
affluence by buying up old tea boxes and extracting 
the silver from the lead. 
The Superintendents of estates in Ceylon have 
many duties and are pressed for labour to cany 
them all through ; and to add pasting and lacquering 
chests is at present out of the question. 
The Home trade do not want it, for they often 
pile the loose tea up in their windows in pyramid 
form or cant an open chest (with the tea in it) 
in the shop window with their printed statement 
of its superior quality and marvellous price, and it 
looks very well. The packet tea also in all man- 
ner of attractive labels is a prominent feature. 
But Mr. Webster and your readers must not 
think nothing is done for new maikets requiring at- 
tractive packages, for ininy frequent visits to inspect my 
teas at the extensive Warehouses (Bonded) at Cutler 
St. belonging to the East and West India Dock 
Coy., I have been much interested in inspecting the 
work going on in the blending and packing Depart- 
ment where a large staff of men, women and chil- 
dren are engaged, weighing and packing tea into very 
attractive packages — ranging from 4 to 40 lb. made 
•f japanned tin in various colours with all sorts of 
devices upon them and sent in by the export mer- 
chant for shipment in bond to many foreign markets. 
It is true it is not all Ceylon tea that is used, for 
there is a blending department adjoining the packing 
department into which the merchant sends so 
many chests of Ceylon, India and China tea to 
be blended into such a grade as his foreign cus- 
tomer has approved. We cannot do that blending 
here or even in Colombo for obvious reasons ; but I 
frequently use the packing rooms noted above for 
Ceylon teas in canisters such as I have named 
ana possibly a day may come in which those 
japanned and adorned boxes may be made in 
Colombo for the American and other markets. At 
present their freight to Colombo or to the estates 
is prohibitory. I have not mentioned the one-pound 
packages in lead foil ; for as every one knows this 
has long been practised in Ceylon. — Yours truly, 
THOMAS DICKSON. 
THE INCONSTANT MOON. 
Dear Sib, — "Jaffna College" has answered my 
questions, and, in doing so, has given us the accepted 
text-book theory of the lunar tides ; but this does 
not get us much forrader in the elucidation of the 
subject, " weather. " A closer study of my letter 
would, I think, have shown that I was not ignorant 
of these simple facts. The height of the " tide," at 
given points, is known and foretold for every day in 
the year at almost all the ports in Europe and 
America. But these " heights " are, as I suggested, 
different in different places, and caused by coast-lines 
and currents, fluvial and otherwise, forced back upon 
themselves, as well as elsewhere augmenting the 
flow. I half expected" Jaffna College " would stumble 
over this question. Will he be good enough to say when, 
where, and by whom the lunar tide has been " mea- 
sured," seen, or even suspected in mid-ocean ? At any 
given port large allowances have to be made (on 
account of the causes I have named) in order to 
arrive at the actual height of the lunar-tide. His 
first answer is, therefore, wrong. Will he try again? 
Mathematicians have, we know, calculated the mean 
result of the force of attraction acting on the mobile 
watery surface of the earth of the moon and the sun 
acting together, in opposition, and at varying angles 
to each other ; but by " measurement" I mean what 
the word actually signifies. The question I had in 
reserve, in this connection, was this: what sort of 
water " weather' ' (below the surface) does the moon 
cause in the ocean to make the " analogy" he 
spoke of in the "air," apart from slight fluctua- 
tions of density at given depths ? In hie answer 
he attempts some comparisons of this kind, but they 
are only the usual stock-in-trade arguments of the 
very few moon-and-weather mongers left. They have 
been answered and done to death a thousand times, 
not merely by assertion, but by patient observation 
and the utter failure of adherents of the theory 
to prove their case in practice. So much is this 
the case, and so dead and buried, so far as practi- 
cal scientific men are concerned, is all discussion 
of the subject, that it is but waste of time to go over 
it again, lint seeing "Jaffna College" still lingering in 
old paths I thought a consideration of the question 
from new points might be useful. But the good 
old text-books Mill turn up ! My questions two and 
three were designedly put to lure him away from 
these. They may, perhaps, be called " catch- 
questions," but I think the " vhy not t" in num- 
ber three, should have indicated this. Let us 
shut up the text-book, and put the theory 
of tides in language of our own. The moon is 
far away enough lrom the earth to illume one 
hemisphere at a time. Somewhere on this hemis- 
phere not far from under the moon, the water is 
said to be "heaped up," is, in fact, over a given 
extent as measured from the eaith's centre, higbex 
than mean sea level, but so vast and broad in exent 
is this slight rise as compaied to the whole surface, 
that it cannot be seen or measured. If there were 
no sun it would be a fixed and constant condition in 
relation to the moon (ignoring the obliquity of her 
orbit, tVc.) It is not a wave, and travels only with 
the moon round the earth once in a month; but as 
the earth turns on her axis twenty-seven or twenty- 
eight times quicker than this slow movement, coasts 
and islands and rocks oveitake this watery curve, go 
through it, and under it if they are smail and low, 
or dash against it and get their tidal rivers (like the 
y/tiuius) blocked up by it, till, having passed through 
and beyond it, all is clear and normal again till the 
counterpoise in the opposite hemisphere is reached 
with similar results. "Jaffna College" has explained the 
part the sun plays which I need not repeat. But I 
invited "Jaffna College " away from coasts to the mid- 
ocean. There, I have shown, we have a slight bulge 
which takes a month to move round the earth, a sleepy 
old billow too bluggish to make " sea-weather. 
This is dons by the sun and the earth's rotation. 
But what analogy can exist between a state of 
things in the partialiy-spread ocean of varying depths, 
resting on nothing which the sun can affect, with an 
atmosphere weighing 15 lb. to the square inch resting 
upon it. And a state of things in a gaseous, com- 
paratively imponderable ubiquitous atmosphere of 
practically uniform depth, tsith which the water of 
the ocean is for ever mingling, rising in vapour and 
descending in rain, mist and dews ; and travelling 
from pole to equator and from equator to pole with, 
comparatively, infinite velocity, blowing steadily over 
vast surfaces one way, and another way over vast sur- 
faces elsewhere, rent by whirling storms, hurricanes 
and cyclones, and so obeying the sun as he affects 
oceans, lakes, islands, continents, and mountain-ranges 
to such an extent that the moon's beggarly influence 
is disturbed, destroyed and so generally " knocked 
into a cocked-hat" — as "Jaffna College " 's countr\rajn 
say, that science defies any man to trace " that 
influence in even the slighest degree. " Jaffna Col- 
lege " may reply, but I have done for the present 
ONE INTERESTED. 
POTASH IN TEA SOILS : AN INTERESTING 
LETTER FROM MR. JOHN HUGHES. 
London, E.. , Nov. 23. 
Dear Sir, — I sent you last week a copy of my 
pamphlet on >' The Comparative Analyses of Indian 
Ceylon and China Tea " being a reprint of the papers 
published in the Ceylon Observer in April and May 
