tropical regions where it is grown it forms the staple food for both man and animals. These nuts contain about 50 percent oil. We import ground-nuts into this country forthe sake of the oil, which is worth from twenty to thirtyshillings a ton, and is employed in soap-making. The residue left after expressing the oil forms a valuable oil- cake, worth from ?8 to ?10 a ton.
Sago, as you know, is obtained from the pith of the sago-palm. The tree, when mature, is cut down, and the pith, after being extracted, is washed in water on a sieve. The meal, which is mostly starch, settles at the bottom of the water, and is collected by draining off the water anddrying in the sun.
The tree is cultivated widely throughout the tropics, but its natural home is New Guinea and certain parts of the coast of Arica. Here it forms the staple food of thenatives, who bake the meal into a kind of bread or hard cake. Its importance to them as their chief breadstuff is seen from the fact that a fully-grown tree yields about700 lbs. of sago-meal, while
it is said that a healthy man can live on a diet of 2.5 lbs. of the meal daily.
The natives of the Pacific and Indian Archipelagoes depend almost entirely upon the breadfruit tree for their food supply. It yields a fruit which is to them what our wheaten loaf is to us. It is their bread.
This is a most wonderful tree, and affords a splendid illustration of Nature"s lavish bounty in these regions. The fruit grows in such abundance that each tree bears and ripens crop after crop in succession during the year. Threetrees are said to be sufficient to support a full-grown man for eight months out of the twelve. The fruit contains a porous and mealy pith, enclosed in a tough outer rind. It is usually plucked before it is quite ripe, and baked on hot stones. It tastes, when cooked, very much like wheatenbread.
To the natives of Central America, the West Indies, and other tropical parts, the banana or plantain is an equally important tree; it supplies their staple food. The fruit which it yields contains within its outer rind a mealy substance, which, when dried in the oven, resembles bread both in taste and composition. It is the bread of the people there.
In composition it is less nutritious than some of the other breadstuffs already named, as it contains only about 2 percent gluten mixed withabout 20 percent starchy matter. The average daily allowance of food for a laborer in those regions is about 2 lbs. of the dry banana meal, with the addition of a quarter of a pound of fish or meat. This is said to affordample sustenance. A single tree bears from 40 to 70, and sometimes 80 lbs. weight of fruit. Indeed no plant in the world is more prolific in its products than this tree. It has been caculated that 1000 square feet of land will produce, on the average, 462 lbs. of potatoes or 38 lbs. of wheat; but that same space will yield as much as 4000 lbs. of bananas, and in a shorter time.
The date is justly called the "bread of the desert." Its home is the northern part of Africa. Wherever a spring ofwater exists in those burning sandy deserts, the date-palm is sure to be found. Where every other crop fails, this tree will flourish in spite of the drought.
The people of the oases dry and pound the fruit into a kind of cake, and it becomes the bread of nineteen- twentieths of the population for the greater part of the year.
