TEA-CULTIVATION. 
Chap. XVII. 
afraid, are more curious than truthful. Take the 
following as an example : “ The plantations are 
situated remote from the habitations of man, and 
as much as may he from all other crops, lest the 
delicacy of the tea should suffer from smoke, 
impurity, or contamination of any kind. They 
are manured with dried anchovies and a liquor 
pressed out of mustard-seed. They must enjoy 
the unobstructed beams of the morning sun, and 
thrive best upon well-watered hill-sides. The 
plant is pollarded to render it more branching, 
and therefore more productive, and must he five 
years old before the leaves are gathered.” (!) 
How our worthy tea-farmers in Japan and China 
would laugh if they were told that such things 
were written about their mode of cultivating the 
tea-plant ! 
Such statements remind me of reading, in a 
book upon China, an account of rice cultivation, in 
which the writer cannot understand the practice 
of sowing the rice-seeds very thickly in highly- 
manured beds in the comers of the fields. He 
sagely concludes that it must be upon the prin- 
ciple of “ the more the merrier ” ! It never 
occurred to his mind that these are merely seed- 
beds, where the plants are being reared for the 
purpose of transplanting, and that he may see the 
same kind of practice in any cabbage-garden in 
England. And the readers of the remarks on 
tea-cultivation quoted above may rest assured that 
that useful plant may be cultivated successfully, 
