Ill NUTMEGS AND MACE 127 
wood-eating beetles attack the dead portions and hasten 
the decay of the trees. 
I observed that for some reason the beetles only 
attacked the tree on the side facing the greatest amount 
of light. As in Penang and Province Wellesley the 
trees are usually planted on terraced hill slopes, and no 
shade trees are used, the attack usually takes place on 
the side of the tree farthest from the hill slope, so that 
dying trees could be seen to have the bark destroyed in 
a line on this face, and all the boughs on that side dead. 
The beetles probably breed very fast, as thousands 
were to be seen in a single tree. 
That this insect was responsible for the catastrophe 
of 1860, when the cultivation of the nutmeg in Singa- 
pore was quite destroyed and that of Penang largely 
diminished, I think there can be little doubt, from 
Collingwood’s description. He writes as follows : — 
In the night a tree would be attacked and the morning 
light would show its topmost branches withered ; the leaves fell 
off ; the disease slowly spread downward, chiefly at one side of 
the tree (the lower portion often for a long time green and 
bushy); the tree became one unsightly mass of bare and 
whitened twigs. No situation was exempt from its ravages, 
hills and valleys alike suffered, nor could any principle be 
traced in its promiscuous attacks. Upon a close examination of 
diseased parts it is found that the formative layer inside the 
hark dries up and turns hlack, the leaves then wither and fall 
off, and soon the hark is found to he full of small perforations, 
but no insect of any kind has ever been discovered in connection 
with the change, nor has any fungus been charged with the 
destruction. 
I have italicised the passages which seem most 
strongly to point to the disease and destruction being 
caused by the Scolytid. 
The death of the tree from the top downwards is 
very characteristic of destruction caused by deficiency 
in nutrition due to injury to the roots, or what is 
equivalent, the ringing or partial ringing of the tree at 
the base. This is confirmed by the blackening of the 
cambium layer, which, cut off from the roots by the 
