May 2, 1892.] 
THE TROPICAL AGRICULTURIST. 
819 
adulthood. Having given some of the evil effects of 
thein, it is only right that I should give some of 
its good effects. Thein has developed the brain 
power of our race, as is seen in the wonderful ad- 
vance of inventive power. It has raised the animal 
man into the brain man. The crave for education 
is a consequence of a stimulating power developing 
the brain, but tlie question is whether this sudden 
forcing ahead of man's nervous system is for his 
permanent advantage. Is the Australian, who 
heads the list of nations who drink tea, which 
nature has compelled him to do in consequence 
of the large quantity of meat he eats, gaining 
by this hotliouse forcing of his nervous system in a 
hot climate like ours '! I say certainly not, for of all 
Australian vices I look on the one which is most 
likely to permanently injure his constitution, or rather 
the constitutions of his children, is his tea-drinking 
habits. My answer, then, to this question — Is tee- 
totalism as now carried out, advantageous to the 
human race ? must be in the negative, for with the 
non-abstainers who drink tea largely the alcohol they 
take in a measure counteracts the injurious effects of 
thein."* 
The doctor contends that " we should eat less meat 
and more vegetables, especially fruit, and then we 
should not require the amount of stimulants now con- 
sumed by the teetotal and non-teetotal aiiembers of 
the community, and the future race will have a better 
prospect before it, for there are already signs of de- 
generation in our race. The degeneration of a race 
commences with its female members, in that at first 
they cannot nourish their little ones, and then they 
have very small families. The first of these failings we 
notice amongst us. Woman's Ijrains are being stimu- 
lated too much by thein, consequently she may liecome 
highly developed at the expense of her usefulness. 
In conclusion I am of opinion that teetotalism as at 
present carried on is useless for State purposes, for I 
consider that a race of people imbibing tea largely 
without fermented beverages would suffer the same 
fate aa some of the vegetarian colonies, for it 
might answer with the parents but it would be death 
to their children. The race would wear out owing 
to nerve exhaustion. The above are the thoughts of 
one who has been an almost lifelong teetotaler. Tea, 
coffee, cocoa, tobacco, fermented drinks have all their 
usefulness, and when taken in moderation may not 
do harm any more than meat, vegetables and fruit. 
But they must be taken in reason, and then they 
are not harmful. Virtue cariied to excess becomes 
irksome to others, and so it is with all things. Tea 
plays havoc with our food ferments — nature's guardians 
of our bodies agsinst disease. We live in an age of 
stimulants — an age of excitement— and we demand 
impossibilities. We have discovered a few things 
and get disgusted at not knowing all things. We 
expect the microscope to tell us everything about 
the causes of disease, yet are too lazy to analyse the 
blood during the different stages of disease, but listen 
with mouth wide open to everyone who says he has 
discovered the cause of this or that disease, when 
in reality no single microbe has been so far proved 
to cause any one disease. Pasteur, the chemist, is 
the only man who has told us anything positive, 
and the chemist we must depend on, at least so 
says my brother, Heneage Gibbes, in his latest work 
on ' Morbid Histology', just published. The Russians 
place a slice of lemon in their tea, which must 
strengthen its power of delaying tlic digestion of 
food, imd in the Black country the men add salt to 
their beer. Tea is poison to anyone with a consump- 
tive tendency."— Sydney Daili/ Tdi'f/niph, Feb. 20th. 
CULTUHK OF TM)IABUBBEE TltEES. 
Mr. H. (Jrist, of Bale, Switzerland, wi'iting on the 
above sul)ject in Garden unil Forest, says :— It is, 
perhaps, wortli while to call attention to the ea.-e witli 
which that beautiful tree can be propagated for 
cuttings. As is well known, it is only necessary to 
take a piece of a In'anch and insert it into moist sand 
* FKiiuy 11 aiiiii diiriiiK to talk of alcohol oorreoling llio 
vU<)'^ts ol' tliciiiu !— Ku, T. A. 
and to protect the cutting with a bell-glass to secure 
a rooted plant ; but it is less well-known, perhaps, that 
the last articulation of the branch is capable of making 
roots much more quickly and readily than those lower 
down. Mr. Gamble, inspector of the forests of Madras, 
in Soutli India, tells me that when they desire, in his dis- 
trict, to make plantations of this valuable tree, workmen 
always take the end of a branch with a single leaf for 
the cutting, as experience has shown that this is the 
way to obtain plants quickly and surely, and I believe 
that horticulturists would do well to follow this plan 
always in propagating Picus elastica. 
This tree, by the way, does not demand a real 
tropical climate. On the contrary, in flourishes outside 
the tropics in regions where snow falls sometimes and 
which experience several degrees of frost. I have 
seen in the beautiful garden of Hamah, near Algiers, 
specimens of Ficus elastica, and of its relative, F. 
lloxhurgliii, as large as our large forest trees, casting a 
shade blacker and thicker than I have ever seen 
before. Generally, the genus Ficvs is hardy and easy 
to acclimatise. 
I<icus australis succeeds admirably in Algiers, and 
f. Benjamina is used in the same city as a shade tree 
in the suburlj of Mustapha. There is a large specimen 
of Ficun australis, already old, on the Italian Riviera at 
Mentone, which, protected on the north by a house, 
forms a superb mass of dark green foliage ; and at 
Cadiz there is a handsome avenue of large fig-trees, 
with small leaves, not far from the Botanic Garden. 
These are trees two feet or more in diameter of trunk, 
with thick spreading heads. There are often severe 
frosts, however, in all these regions. 
With regard to the fruit of F'icus elastica, I have 
once seen it on a small plant cultivated in a pot 
at Bale, so that it appears that this species bears 
fruit sometimes in a comparatively young state. — 
India-liubber Journal. 
_ . 
THE OKIGIN OF PETROLEUM. 
Theories as to the origin of petroleum have been 
numerous — some plausible, some hardly so, but inge- 
nious, some ridiculous, though all more or less in- 
teresting as presented by their advocates, the fol- 
lowing rather unique theory is propounded by T. B. 
Blalone in the Fittdl/urf/h Disjiatcli : — 
What was the origin of the oil that exists in the 
earth in such vast quantities ? This is the question 
that the thoughtful observer asks himself as he sur- 
veys a score or more of immense wells at McDo- 
nald, out of which in the aggregate fully 90,000 
barrels of oil are discharged daily. Think of it— 
a vast river of petroleum rushing out of the earth. 
Truly this question is one that is sufficient to set us 
to thinking. How are we to account for this olea- 
ginous wonder that comes up from l,t;00 ft. or more 
below the level of the hills '! How easy for some to 
put the question oft' with the remark that it is 
not for us to answer — that it is one of the mysteries 
of the world that God did not intend that man 
should ever understand ; but the thinker is not to be 
satisfied with an,y such evasion of a question the 
nature of which demands an explanation. 
Down deep in the earth he knows that there is 
a vast deposit of oil. Call it lake, or river, or what 
you will, it is there, and, judging from the amount 
that rushes up through a (I in. casing in a second 
of time, one is inclined to think that it is very 
tired of imprisonment, and has long been wanting 
to get out. 
The scientific man, ever ready to wrestle with any 
vexatious problem, is the only individual that under- 
takes to give us any liglit on the subject. He ad- 
mits that it is a profuud subject in every sense of 
the word, and wishes that he luid some kind of a 
subterranean telescope that would enable Iiim to 
study the rocks from whence tliis great volume of 
potroleum comes as tlic astronomers study the st'u-s 
Tlie distance that intervenes shuts out an investi' 
gation as completely as if the source of the oil was 
far beyond the North I'ole. 
Hut tlio drill and the sand punui that n-o down 
into the earth, what do thoy reveal ■> Look at tli ^ 
