e nut is but little
employed as a domestic utensil, the lower class of people preferring the
bamboo and the labu (Cucurbita lagenaria) and the better sort being
possessed of coarse chinaware. If the filaments surrounding the stem are
anywhere manufactured into cloth, as has been asserted, it must be in
countries that do not produce cotton, which is a material beyond all
comparison preferable: besides that certain kind of trees, as before
observed, afford in their soft and pliable inner bark what may be
considered as a species of cloth ready woven to their hands.

This tree in all its species, stages, fructification, and appropriate
uses has been so elaborately and justly described by many writers,
especially the celebrated Rumphius in his Herbarium Amboinense, and Van
Rheede in his Hortus Malabaricus, that to attempt it here would be an
unnecessary repetition, and I shall only add a few local observations on
its growth. Every dusun is surrounded with a number of fruit-bearing
trees, and especially the coconut where the soil and temperature will
allow them to grow, and, near the bazaars or sea-port towns, where the
concourse of inhabitants is in general much greater than in the country,
there are always large plantations of them to supply the extraordinary
demand. The tree thrives best in a low, sandy soil, near the sea, where
it will produce fruit in four or five years; whilst in the clayey ground
it seldom bears in less than seven to ten years. As you recede from the
coast the growth is proportionably slower, owing to the greater degree of
cold among the hills; and it must attain there nearly its full height
before it is productive, whereas in the plains a child can generally
reach its first fruit from the ground. Here, said a countryman at Laye,
if I plant a coconut or durian-tree I may expect to reap the fruit of it;
but in Labun (an inland district) I should only plant for my
great-grandchildren. In some parts where the land is particularly high,
neither these, the betel-nut, nor pepper-vines, will produce fruit at
all.

It has been remarked by some writer that the date-bearing palm-tree and
the coconut are never found to flourish in the same country. However this
may hold good as a general assertion it is a fact that not one tree of
that species is known to grow in Sumatra, where the latter, and many
others of the palm kind, so much abound. All the small low islands which
lie off the western coast are skirted near