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16 CONCRETE OIL OP COCOA. 
ART. IV.-- CONCRETE OIL OF COCOA. By Augustine Duhamel. 
lN a the belief that some details respecting this substance, now- 
becoming better known, and more employed in this country, 
may not be uninteresting to some of the readers of this Jour- 
nal, the following notice of its origin and character is submit- 
ted. 
The oil or butter, so called from its well known French 
name Beurre de Cacao, is obtained from the seeds of the The- 
obroma cacao, T. hicolor, and other varieties, but principally 
from the first, which grows from tw 7 elve to twenty feet in 
height in South America and the West Indies. 
This tree belongs to the Polyadelphia pentandria of Lin- 
naeus, and family of Byttneriacese. The entire fruit is in the 
form of acucumber; it is divided internally into five cells, which 
are filled with a yellowish sub-acid pulp, in the middle of which 
are scattered about 30 seeds having the form of almonds, but 
the interior of which is brown, and divided into irregular 
lobes, which are separated by small white membranes. These 
seeds are taken out after pounding the fruit and allowing it to 
ferment for some time. They are afterwards dried, or previ- 
ously buried in the earth, for several weeks, to deprive them 
of their acridity. 
The chief sources from which commerce is supplied are Ca- 
raccas,Guatimala, St. Domingo, and Martinique. The first step 
towards the extraction from the seeds of its concrete oil, is 
the process of torrefaction executed in a sheet iron cylinder, 
the object of which is to destroy the mucilage which attaches 
the almond to its enevelope. When the torrefaction is complete, 
which is known by the discontinuance of a crackling noise, the 
seeds are placed so as to be acted upon by a wooden roller, 
which breaks the then friable thin covering. 
The cocoa seeds are then separated from the husks, and re- 
duced to powder by rubbing them forcibly over a wire sieve 
