ing and cultivation. There seems to be no fixed age for clean cutting, which is regulated by the demand for bark; but after felling the same ground is replanted, as in Sikkim. The annual produce at present is about a million kilos, but I gathered that at the low price of quinine there is not enough profit in the business to attract private industry, and that the plantations are kept up, like our own in India, for the benefit of the people of the country.
The climate and rainfall seemed to be more equable throughout the year than in Sikkim. Some large Cypresses planted by Dr. Junghuun forty or fifty years ago were growing well, and I measured one of C. sempervirens 65 feet by 6 feet 3 inches.
After spending a most interesting afternoon here, we returned in the car to Bandoeng, where we stayed in a large, well-appointed hotel, full of residents and travellers; and on the 12th started early by train for Parangkoeda, a station on the line to Buitenzorg. Five miles from here is the fine old tea plantation of Parakan-Salak, managed by Mr. Boreel, to whom I had a letter of introduction. The road to it ran through an avenue of large symmetrical trees of Dammara alba, which were 80 or 100 feet high by from 6 to 9 feet in girth.
Some of the oldest parts of this plantation, opened nearly seventy years ago, on which the tea plants were worn out, have been replanted with rubber mixed with Albizzia, whose roots are believed to improve the soil by the bacteria which they produce. In this area the poorest land was planted with Ficus elastica at 50 feet apart, and the rubber from these trees has yielded as much as four shillings a pound, though now much cheaper. But as there is no cost on the produce beyond the initial planting, and the trees will produce rubber for many years, it may be a profitable crop on land too rocky and steep for tea.
On arriving at Mr. Boreel’s large and handsome bungalow, in which were many trophies of the big game of the island—tiger, rhinoceros, banteng (a species of wild cattle allied to the Indian bison or gaur) and sambur—it came on to rain so hard that we did not visit the tea gardens now worked, which lie at from 2,000 to 4,000 feet; but after lunch we saw the factory, which is very large and well equipped with modern machinery for drying, rolling and sifting the tea. Besides that made for Holland, a good deal of green tea is specially made, by rolling the leaf in hot pans by hand as in China, for export to the Persian Gulf, where it fetches as much as two florins a pound. Java tea, though not fetching so high a price in England as the best Indian and Ceylon, is now, on account of the cheapness of labour and transport, a very profitable business, and will probably, in the long run, pay better than rubber. A great deal of English capital is now invested in the island in both of these industries, and one hears comparatively little of coffee, which used to be the principal produce for export. Owing to the cost of good timber, imported boxes of plywood are now largely used, and seemed very superior to those roughly made from inferior local wood. On returning to Buitenzorg we had another long day in the gardens, and were much helped by Mr. Koorders, who is publishing a complete work on the trees of Java. Though it is impossible to form an accurate estimate of so large and varied an island as Java
