536 
appeared oti the untapped bark, but last year and this year it was 
appearing on the renewed bark. Mr. Petch did not seem to think that 
it would interfere with the tree further than making the bark rough 
where the canker had been. The importance of this roughening, he 
seemed to think, was serious, and in time it would be necessary to 
invent another system of tapping. He would be inclined to recom- 
mend the cutting out of the diseased bark and sterilising the tapping 
knife, as the knives would carry the infection from one tree to 
another. The tools could be disinfected by dipping them in a one-in 
a-hundred parts of Corrosive sublimate- 
The roughening of the bark due to the canker must be 
extraordinary if it is so great as to interfere with the tapping so 
seriously as Mr. Petch states. Many of the old trees in the Botanic 
Gardens in Singapore have very rough bark even where they have 
not been tapped, others have been irregularly hacked about in course 
of various experiments and the bark is raised and lumpy, some 
again have a regularly undulating surface, yet we have had no 
difficulty in tapping these trees, and make something better than 
scrap from them. It is not at all probable that trees after say 10 or 15 
years tapping will have beautifully smooth bark, like that we see in 
the young trees. This cannot be expected, but there need be little 
fear but that the trees will still be easily tapped, and if this 
roughening of the bark is all that “canker” does for the tree, it 
need not be much dreaded. 
PROLIFIC COCONUTS. 
Mr. E. B. Copeland, Dean of the College of Agriculture of 
the Philippines, writes apropos of the prolific coconut which figured 
lately in the Bulletin, and says: — “The Moro Plantation and 
Development Company has a tree near Zamboanga, from which 106 
nuts were taken at one cutting, and 112 two months later. I saw the 
tree less than, two months later still, and it seemed to have fully a 
hundred nuts ready to harvest again. It looked like the tree in your 
picture, except that it was older and taller.” 
