rious imitations. Why, you probably never heard of
manilla hemp before, until this very minute, and yet you have been
familiarly using it all your lifetime, while 400,000 hundredweights of
that useful article are annually imported into this country alone. It is
an interesting study to take any day a list of market quotations, and
ask oneself about every material quoted, what it is and what they do
with it.

For example, can you honestly pretend that you really understand the use
and importance of that valuable object of everyday demand, fustic? I
remember an ill-used telegraph clerk in a tropical colony once
complaining to me that English cable operators were so disgracefully
ignorant about this important staple as invariably to substitute for its
name the word 'justice' in all telegrams which originally referred to
it. Have you any clear and definite notions as to the prime origin and
final destination of a thing called jute, in whose sole manufacture the
whole great and flourishing town of Dundee lives and moves and has its
being? What is turmeric? Whence do we obtain vanilla? How many
commercial products are yielded by the orchids? How many totally
distinct plants in different countries afford the totally distinct
starches lumped together in grocers' lists under the absurd name of
arrowroot? When you ask for sago do you really see that you get it? and
how many entirely different objects described as sago are known to
commerce? Define the uses of partridge canes and cohune oil. What
objects are generally manufactured from tucum? Would it surprise you to
learn that English door-handles are commonly made out of coquilla nuts?
that your wife's buttons are turned from the indurated fruit of the
Tagua palm? and that the knobs of umbrellas grew originally in the
remote depths of Guatemalan forests? Are you aware that a plant called
manioc supplies the starchy food of about one-half the population of
tropical America? These are the sort of inquiries with which a new
edition of 'Mangnall's Questions' would have to be filled; and as to
answering them--why, even the pupil-teachers in a London Board School
(who represent, I suppose, the highest attainable level of human
knowledge) would often find themselves completely nonplussed. The fact
is, tropical trade has opened out so rapidly and so wonderfully that
nobody knows much about the chief articles of tropical growth; we go on
using them in an uninquiring spirit of childlike fa