102 
FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
because man is not so vile there, after all, 
as he is in some other places we visited. 
Ceylon is a lovely island. Cocoanuts 
grow there in the greatest profusion. 
When the natives need a little money, 
they go out and gather a few cocoanuts 
and sell them to the ships that come 
along. They don’t need much for clothes, 
judging by what they wear, and there is 
a profusion of things to eat growing all 
around them; consequently they don’t 
have to gather many cocoanuts. 
I told you that the most wonderful, the 
most interesting, the most beautiful bo¬ 
tanical garden was, perhaps, at Buiten- 
zorg, Java. I also told you the one at 
Singapore was but little behind it. The 
botanical garden near Kandy, Ceylon, is 
certainly one of the most magnificent 
things from a horticultural standpoint, 
that it is possible to imagine. There is 
no known tropical plant, fruit or shrub, 
ornamental, useful, commercial or in any 
other way valuable, but that you can find 
it in that botanical garden at Kandy. It 
is a wonder. It is some fifty miles from 
the sea, at an altitude of about two thou¬ 
sand feet. It has particularly strong feat¬ 
ures in the way of useful plants. You find 
all varieties of the rubber tree in Ceylon. 
There are more varieties of rubber trees 
than there are citrus trees. It is, next to 
tea, the great product of Ceylon now. 
Florida, in its palmy days of the orange 
boom before the freeze, when everyone 
was crazy about oranges, was a sane 
country compared with these oriental 
countries I have talked to you about. 
They are just now, absolutely wild and 
crazy upon the subject of production of 
a single commodity. They are cutting 
down cocoanut groves that have support¬ 
ed them for generations; they are dig¬ 
ging up their plantations of coffee, tea 
and everything else, to produce an article 
for us to use on our automobiles. They 
are planting rubber, rubber, rubber. It 
is wonderful, too, how much money they 
are making. 
The rubber trees seem to require very 
little care, and are tapped something as 
our pine trees are for turpentine, only 
they cut a spiral groove around them up 
as high as they can reach, and don’t box. 
Nutmegs, cinnamon, cloves, cocoa, etc., 
all are found flourishing in Ceylon. 
Some of the most remarkable things 
in animal life are to be found here. Cey¬ 
lon is one of the places where you find 
wild elephants. One of the most won¬ 
derful things we saw was a flying fox. 
You can scarcely imagine a great, big 
creature like a fox flying around in the 
air, but in the botanical gardens there are 
flying foxes that fly long distances. 
One peculiar fruit seen here is the can¬ 
non-ball fruit. It looks like a cannon 
ball had been shot into the trunk of the 
tree. Then there is the jack-fruit. Look¬ 
ing at it from a distance, it appears very 
much like a tree with watermelons grow¬ 
ing out of the trunk and from the limbs, 
only the skin is somewhat different from 
a watermelon, but in shape and size they 
are very much like one. It belongs to the 
breadfruit family. I don’t like it. 
Our next run was back to the main¬ 
land of India, at Bombay. In the large 
Bombay market you find anything in all 
creation you may chance to want in the 
way of vegetables, fruit or animals. 
Lions, monkeys, tigers—almost all the 
things you ever read about. We had a 
rule, in these Oriental countries, if they 
