(Footnote.  For these observations on the growth of the coffee, as well as many others on the vegetable productions of the island, I am indebted to the letters of Mr. Charles Miller, entered on the Company’s records at Bencoolen, and have to return him my thanks for many communications since his return to England.  On the subject of this article of produce I have since received the following interesting information from the late Mr. Charles Campbell in a letter dated November 1803.  “The coffee you recollect on this coast I found so degenerated from want of culture and care as not to be worth the rearing.  But this objection has been removed, for more than three years ago I procured twenty-five plants from Mocha; they produced fruit in about twenty months, are now in their second crop, and loaded beyond any fruit-trees I ever saw.  The average produce is about eight pounds a tree; but so much cannot be expected in extensive plantations, nor in every soil.  The berries are in no respect inferior in flavour to those of the parent country.”  This cultivation, I am happy to hear, has since been carried to a great extent.)

(PLATE 2.  THE DAMMAR, A SPECIES OF PINUS. 
Sinensis delt.  Swaine Sc. 
Published by W. Marsden, 1810.)

DAMMAR.

The dammar is a kind of turpentine or resin from a species of pine, and used for the same purposes to which that and pitch are applied.  It is exported in large quantities to Bengal and elsewhere.  It exudes, or flows rather, spontaneously from the tree in such plenty that there is no need of making incisions to procure it.  The natives gather it in lumps from the ground where it has fallen, or collect it from the shores of bays and rivers whither it has floated.  It hangs from the bough of the tree which produces it in large pieces, and hardening in the air it becomes brittle and is blown off by the first high wind.  When a quantity of it has fallen in the same place it appears like a rock, and thence, they say, or more probably from its hardness, it is called dammar batu; by which name it is distinguished from the dammar kruyen.  This is another species of turpentine, yielded by a tree growing in Lampong, called kruyen, the wood of which is white and porous.  It differs from the common sort, or dammar batu, in being soft and whitish, having the consistence and somewhat the appearance of putty.  It is in much estimation for paying the bottoms of vessels, for which use, to give it firmness and duration, it ought to be mixed with some of the hard kind, of which it corrects the brittleness.  The natives, in common, do not boil it, but rub or smear it on with their hands; a practice which is probably derived from indolence, unless, as I have been informed, that boiling it, without oil, renders it hard.  To procure it, an incision is made in the tree.

DRAGONS-BLOOD.