152 
THE TROPICAL AGRICULTURIST. 
[Sept, i, 1897 . 
totrl cost of rearing 1,000 betel palms for five years — 
thai i’, until they begin to yield — is about £127. 13s., 
including compound interest at 9 per cent. After five 
years a thousand trees are estimated to yield about £50 
a year, from which, after taking £18 14s. for watering 
assessment and wages and £11 9s. Xl\d. as interest at 
the rate of 9 per cent on £127 13s., there remains a 
net estimated profit of £19 16s. 3|f?., or 15-52 per cent. 
IN BENG.VL 
The supari, or betel-nut is common in Eastern Ben- 
gal, especially in Tipperah, Backergunge, and Dacca; 
and its cultivation is very profitable to proprietors of 
land. It bears fruit in the eighth year, and is most 
productive from that time to the sixteenth year, when 
the produce falls off. The nuts are gathered in Nov- 
ember. 
Betel-nut cultivation is very extensive, especially in 
the Police circles of Tubkibagara and Hajigunge, A 
considerable trade in this article is carried on with 
Dacca, Naraingunge, and Calcutta. The cultivators 
of the palm usually own a large piece of ground, slightly 
raised above the level of the surrounding country, 
and surrounded by ditches. In the centre of this 
they build their dwellings, and all round them they 
plant betel-nut trees. An acre of land will obtain 
about 3,000 trees. When first planted the betel-nut 
requires to be protected from the sun ; for this 
purpose rows of madar trees are planted bet ■ een 
the lines of betel-nut trees, and the growth of jungle 
is encouraged. When the betel-nut trees have grown 
strong, and no longer require the shade, the cultiva- 
tors are too lazy and thoughtless to remove the jungle; 
and the result is that whole pergunnahs which were 
once fully cultivated are now covered with dense jun- 
gle, in which even the betel-nut trees cannot grow ; 
while thousands of the inhabitants have been swept 
away by cholera and malarious fever of a very viru- 
lent type. The unliealthiness of the neighbourhood 
of betel-nut plantations is variously attributed to the 
dense jungle and under-giowth above mentioned, to 
the exhalations from the trees, and to the malarious 
gases generated by decomposing vegetable matter in the 
ditches surrounding the plantations. The betel-nut 
trees grow to a height of about CO feet ; and in some 
pergunnahs they are cultivated to such an extent as 
to almost entirely exclude rice cultivation, — The Indian 
Agriculturist. 
PLANTING IN JAVA. 
TE.V— AR.4BIAN COFFEE— LIBERIAN COFFEE. 
We m^ntionel lately that the M. BI. steamer 
“ Oceanien ” brought back to Ceylon, after a visit to 
the Straits, Mr. John W. B. Davidson, engineer of 
Messrs. Walker, Sons & Co., who set out in May last, 
chiefly with the object of doing business for his firm 
in the way of supplying oofiee machinery to the 
planters in Java. Leaving here by P. & 0. steamer 
in Blay, he made no stay at Singapore, but took the 
first steamer to Batavia, which he reached on the 
27th of May. Prom Batavia he visited the tea dis- 
tricts, situated at an elevation of about 3,500 feet, 
and which are reached by means of a narrow-gauge 
railway in three hours. This railway he describes as 
very suitable to the needs of the country and the trains 
only capable of improvement in being furnished with 
a refreshment car, as the Ceylon tr.ains are, instead of 
the refreshment arrangements being confined to a 
few stations on the route. His halting-place was 
Tjiwangie estate, a place of over 1,600 acres owned by 
a company, but having an Englishman, who is a part 
proprietor, i < charge. Here he made his head- 
quarter.s, and, going round the district, he says, 
he saw 
TEA THAT SURPRISED HIM 
very much indeed. “The growth and appearance of 
the bushes,’’ he remarked, “ were a great way ahead 
of anything 1 had seen in Ceylon in that time ; in 
fact, tea 18 months old was something similar to the 
tea here three years old. The soil was far superior 
to the Ceylon soil, and they do not bother about weeds, 
and neither have they to manure. I must say I am 
rather surprised that more Englishmen do not go there, 
for there are only two Englishmen in the place that 
I know of. and they are keen on getting some of 
their fellow-countrymen there. I suppose I visited 
nine or ten estates in that district— all good, and fur- 
nished with well-equipped factories. Their process of 
manufacture is not like ours ; they do not go in for 
withering to the same extent that we do, their tea 
being sun-dried, which entails a lot of work, and 
does not give good results. A fair proportion of the 
tea I saw was in full bearing. 
ARABIAN COFFEE. 
After leaving there I went to the East of Java, 
where there is nothing grown except Arabian coffee. 
This part is where Mr. Turing Mackenzie is, but I 
did not meet him, and only made a short visit there. 
LIBERIAN COFFEE. 
I next went to Samarang, where there is a great 
deal of Liberian coffee planted, and I saw it in various 
stages of growth, and noted that there was a great 
deal of disease amorgst the trees. I also saw a 
quantity of cocoa ; but this year’s crop is an utter 
failure, owing to disease. I rode through a great 
many miles of coffee, planted by Government, which 
struck me as a novelty. The Government there plant 
up coffee, and what they grow is gathered by natives 
and pulped in the native villages. While going 
through the same district I saw some very fine 
teak forests. The Government goes in largely for 
planting teak trees, and lets out the forests to 
different people after the trees are in condition for 
felling. It was all beautiful teak wood. Then I 
returned to the tea district again, and visited one or 
two of the estates I had not previously seen, and 
then returned to Ceylon, having given up the idea I 
had of visiting Sumatra, and having practically also 
abandoned, for want of time, my visit to other 
parts of the Straits, though I called at Penang on the 
way down. Liberian coffee in Java is in a 
bad way at present, owing to low prices, as it barely 
fetches half what it did last year. Only the really 
first-class estates are maintaining the old high prices, 
and there is a great deal of disease about. Those 
who have Arabian coffee are still getting good prices, 
and there is some very good Arabian coffee in the 
place. I saw some over 109 years old and still bearing 
fairly well ; but Liberian has gone down in price, and 
the disease trouble cannot be accentuated too much. 
Mr. Davidson added that, professionally, his trip 
was a success, and his firm will be occupied for some 
time yet in executing the orders he brought back with. 
— Local “Times.” 
Fever in Plants. — Mr. H. M. Richards, who has 
previously studied the effect of wounds on plant- 
respiration. now describes f Annals of Botany, xi., 29) 
a course of experiments on the evolution of heat 
by wounded plants. He finds that accompanying the 
increased rate of respiration is an increase in the 
temperature of the pirts affected. A kind of fever 
supervc.ies, and as in the case of respiration, the 
disturbance runs a definite course, and attains its 
maximum some twenty-four hours after injury. It 
is interesting to note that the atte npt to rally from 
an injury is accompanied by somewhat the same 
symptoms, increased rate of respiration and evolution 
of heat, in plants as in animals. Owing to the nature 
of the case the re-action is less obvious in the former 
than in the latter, and a delicate thermo-electric 
element was required to appreciate the rise in tem- 
perature; but compared with the ordinary tempera- 
ture of plants in relation to the surrounding medium, 
the rise after injury is “ as great, if not greater than 
in animals.” The maximum in all the plants in- 
vestigated w'as between two and three times the ordinaiy 
excess above the surrounding air. Potatoes proved tie 
most satisfactory objects for experiment, and it was 
found that in massive tissues (such as Potatoes or 
Radishes afford) the effect of injury was local, whereas 
in the case of leaves (e.g.. Onion-bulbs) a much greater 
extent of tissue was sympathetically affected . — Natural 
/Science. 
