ii8 
THE TROPICAL AGRICULTURIST. 
[August i, 1890 
coffee ; not a pit has been made for next year's 
supply, that should have the whole benefit of the 
short monsoon we have, and so another year is lost. 
Nothing can be done to the maistry for breaking his 
agreement hy not coming in by the 15th of May, and so 
we are the losers year by year. And what is the conse- 
quence? Fields that could have been planted had labour 
been in have to be abandoned, for^ there is no use of 
thinking that it is borer that is decimating the estates; 
it is want of labour at the right time. Where is the 
use of supplying at all when it has to be done at the 
end of July, and after the middle of August, when the 
place, too, is as full of weeds as it can be, that only 
choke the supply before a weeding can be done ; and 
how can pitting be done properly in weeds three feet 
high? Every work must be done in its order, and yet 
this is an impossibility now. If we do not get 
supplies up, there is no use continuing in 
coffee, and that we have a poor enough chanca 
of getting them up is universally felt by all. Besides 
when the first and principal work is so far behind, 
all the other works suffer in consequence. Shade 
is, to a large extent, required and must also 
be planted out early, but this has to be 
given up generally (a work second to supplying). 
Then digging and all turning of the soil, should be 
done during the rainy season, and this has to be left 
till the end of the monsoon. And why is there all 
this loss of time, simply owing to the fact of the 
labour supply not being sufficient or rather no labour in 
at the first, and whose fault is it ? Superintendents 
are blamed, but it is no more their fault than the man 
in the moon’s. Oooly pay has been increased this year 
as an inducement, but the Mysore cooly is far too 
well off in his country (having fattened on his gains, 
from the coffee district) to trouble about coming in, 
and when the maistry, from whom he has taken ad- 
vance, goes to his village to call him to goto the estate, 
he flatly refuses, knowing very well that he cannot 
be compelled, although he has signed an agreement to 
work from a stated time to a stated time, generally 
from eight months to a year on the estate. Coolies, 
before being paid off in March, are only too eager to 
take an advance; but let them go to their country, 
and it takes no end of persuasion to make them make 
up t mind to return. Can nothing be done to help 
1b< mstry, when in his country, to force the cooly 
to return or have him fined, there and then or im- 
prisoned ? What is the use of warrants being issued when 
the maistry must first go to the coffee district to a Ma- 
gistrate there before he can get one for the cooly, and 
then the warrant never canfind him, and the maistry is so 
far from him, he cannot go to look for him, as his work is 
on the estate, looking after what coolies he may have 
brought in with him. The evil that this men-catching 
by warrant is invoking is now widespread, as coolies 
are knowing enough now to elude any warrant sent, and 
BO laugh at the whole proceeding. Now, I ask, is it 
iust or fair that Government should let valuable proper- 
ties suffer by not giving some small assistance to the 
planters, for in the end it will be the loser as well as 
the planter who has done his best, and yet lost money 
by spending it in this country in coffee when so heavily 
handicapped. Let there be a famine in the Mysore 
district, as there was some years ago (which God forbid) 
and we will have shoals of worthless people come to us 
for the sake of food, and Government will be glad that 
the people are provided for and off its hands, and that 
the planters who have been so in need of labour will now 
have their estates worked for them. What would Gov- 
ernment not have given to have had some thousands of 
iicople provided for during the famine in Ganjam.and 
that we can employ thousands there is no doubt. Why 
should Government send cooly labour to foreign coun- 
tries when it is BO much needed nearer home? Ooolies 
don’t like to leave India, then why not arrange with us ? 
We can employ them but must have as good arrange- 
ments made with us as is made for those who get labour 
S'nt them outside of India. There is an immense 
field here, for Mysore labour is failing us utterly, and 
to get labour from nvor-populatod districts would 
be a boon to distreSBed coffee planters.— -Jf. Mail, 
June 27th. 
NOTES ON POPULAR SCIENCE. 
BY DB. .1. B. TAYLOR, F.L.S., P.G.8., &C., 
Editor of Science Gossip. 
Plants — Gum Trees — Coral. 
A German botanist, who has been for some time 
engaged upon the mathematical study of the contrivan- 
ces for hindering the descent of parts of plants to the 
ground, and for favouring their aerial transit, sums 
them up as follows: — 1, Dust-like (Schizomycetes, fun- 
gus, and fern spores, &c., and the pollen of wind- 
fertilised flowers) ; 2, fruits furnished with bladders 
(as in many of the orchids); 3, hair-like seeds ; 4, disc- 
like and flat (like the fruits of the elm and some of the 
lilies); 5, parachute seeds (like the hosts produced by 
composite plants, and others in the Dipsaceous and 
Plumbaginaceous orders) ; 6, cylindrical and winged 
(like the fruits of many of the Polygonaeese); 7, fruits 
with ridges giving a sail-iike form (like those of Ailan- 
thus) : and 8, samaras, as the wellknown fruits as the 
ash, maple, &c., are called, whose structure enables the 
wind to carry them away with the ecrew-like motion. 
The remarkable thing is how so many plants which have 
not the slightest bolanical relationships to each other 
have managed to hit upon the same identical devices — 
to take out the same patents, in short. 
You do a good deal of “ ringing” in your gum-tree 
forests in Australia. There is no sight which struck 
me more out there (with rather a melancholy impres- 
sion) than the dead, standing forests of ring-barked 
guno-trees, looking so weird that Gustave Dore would 
have been delighted to have sketched them some 
moonlight night. They seemed to me like so many 
vegetable ghosts. lam reminded of my experience by 
reading some remarks made by a German professor of 
forestry on the subject. He goes in for “ ringing” 
scientifically, and shows that the ringing of branches 
produces a more active growth above, and a less active 
growth beneath the ring. Starch is nsually entirely 
absent from the portion below the ring, whilst oxalate 
of potash is usually most abundant there. Of course, 
the German foresters “ ring” their trees to do them 
good, not to kill them so as to clear the land. 
In a recent paper read before the Royal Society of 
Edinburgh, Dr. John Murray, of “• Challenger” fame, 
discussed the question at the origin of coral reefs and 
other calcareous formations in recent seas. Calcareous 
remains are found in great abundance at the sea bot- 
tom in shallow waters, but the amount steadily dimi- 
nishes as the depth increases, until at four thousand 
fathoms almost every trace has disappeared. Dr. Mur- 
ray thinks this is due to solution as the organisms 
slowly fall to the bottom. Within five hundred fa- 
thoms of the surface the ocean everywhere teems with 
life. This is an important fact to record, as the ill- 
fated “ Greely Expe’dition” actually starved within ten 
feet of abundant food, which might have been obtained 
by breaking a hole in the ice and using a shirt as a 
drag net. Dr. Murray is of opinion that the chief rea- 
son why there is such an extraordinary growth of coral 
in tropical regions is because carbonate of lime is con- 
tinually produced in large quantity by the action of 
sulphate of lime in solution on effete products, and that 
the absence of coral reefs on certain shores is explained 
by the uprise of cold water due to winds blowing off shore. 
— Australasian. 
4 , 
Compressed Tea. — The Kew Bulletin for June 
contains an account of the manufacture of com- 
pressed tea at Hankow. This tea is in use through- 
out Russian Siberia, and is made of tea dust com- 
pressed by steam power, and differs from the brick 
tea of Tibet, which is made of the entire leaves 
pressed together. The Timber trees of the Straits 
Settlements are next passed in review, the notice 
being founded on the collections of the late Dr. 
Maingay. The remainder of the part is taken up 
with correspondence, showing the desirability of ex- 
tending the cultivation of Cotton in West African 
colonies.— Gardeners’ Chronicle, 
