Ceylon in 1884 Author:John Ferguson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: time just closed, it may be largely increased in the succeeding season, yet there is no escape from the serious drawbacks which beset the coffee-planter in Ceylo... more »n. The mitigations and silver lining to the dark cloud will be alluded to later on. At an early stage in the appearance of the leaf disease, one and perhaps the chief cause of its appearance had become apparent in the limitation of the cultivation to one plant, and one only, over hundreds of square miles of country which had previously been covered with the most varied vegetation. Nature had revenged herself, just as she had done in Ireland when potatoes threatened to become the universal crop, as well as on extensive wheat fields elsewhere, and on the French vineyards. It could not be said that the fungus had emanated in Ceylon because of coffee being worn out or badly cultivated, for it first appeared in a young district upon vigorous coffee, and it has attacked old and young, vigorous and weak trees, with absolute impartiality. The true remedy, then, for the loss occasioned by this pest—apart from the wisdom of the old adage not to have all one's eggs in one basket—lay in the introduction of New Products. CHAPTER VIT. , NEW PRODUCTS. Cinchona—Tea—Cacao—India-rubber—Liberian Coffee, Fobty years ago the Messrs. Worms (cousins of the Rothschilds, who did an immense deal in developing Ceylon) proved that tea wo aid grow well in the island. Attention had frequently been called to this product, and in 1867 a Ceylon planter was commissioned to report on the tea-planting industry in India. In that same year the attention of planters was also first turned to the cinchona plant, which had been introduced six years earlier to India and Ceylon by Mr. Clements Markham. The Director .of the Botanic Garden, Dr. Thwaite...« less