the long-continued and abundant use of the latter article
for the manufacture of oil. They have regular establishments for the
manufacture of the palm oil, with vats and apparatus (simple though they
be), places and persons for each process: as bruising the fruit from the
nut, boiling, carrying the pulp to a vat, where it is pressed and washed
to extract the oil; one to skim it off from the top of the
liquid--another to carry off the fiber of the pulp or bruised fruit,
which fiber is also appropriated to kindling and other uses. There is no
such method of extracting the oil, as the mistaken idea so frequently
reported by African traders from Europe and America, that the natives
bruise the nut with stones in holes made in the ground, thereby losing a
large percentage of the oil. Even among the crudest they know better
than this, and many use shallow troughs, made of wood in some parts of
Africa, as the Grebo, Golah, and some other peoples on the western
coast, adjacent to Liberia.

Palm Trees Cultivated. Camwood. Ivory

All through the Yoruba country the palm tree is cultivated, being
regularly trimmed and pruned, and never cut down in clearing a farm,
except when from age the tree has ceased to bear, or is of the male
species, when it is cut down for the wine, which is the sap, extracted
from the trunk, in a horizontal position, by boring a hole near the top
and catching it in a vessel, when it is drunk either before, during, or
after fermentation.

Camwood is also very plentiful, but owing to its great weight and the
inconvenience at present of transportation, it does not enter
extensively into the commerce of these parts, except as dyestuffs in the
native markets. Gum elastic or India rubber is plentiful.

Ivory enters largely into commerce, being brought by "middle men" from
the distant interior.

Indian Corn or Maize, Peas, Beans, Ginger, Pepper, Arrowroot, &c

Indian corn, the finest in the world (usually white), is here raised in
the greatest quantities, we having frequently passed through hundreds of
acres in unbroken tracts of cultivated land, which is beginning to enter
into foreign commerce; Guinea corn in great abundance--an excellent
article for horses, spoken of in another place; also peas, such as are
raised for horse and cattle feed in Canada and other parts of America;
white beans in great quantities, as well as those of all colors;
black-eye peas; horse beans; in fact, all of the pulse vegetab