China market.

After removing the peel, the root is grated on a fish-skin, and the
pulp having been strained through a coarse cloth, is washed three or
four times in water, and then dried in the sun.

According to a recent examination of the plant by Mr. Nuttall
("American Journal of Pharmacy," vol. ix., p. 305), the Otaheite salep
is obtained from a new species of tacca, which he names _T. oceanica_.

For many years we have obtained from Tahiti, and other islands of the
South Seas, this fecula, known by the name of Tahiti arrowroot,
probably the produce of _Tacca pinnatifida_. It is generally
spherical, but also often ovoid, elliptic, or rounded, with a
prolongation in the form of a neck, suddenly terminated by a plane.

The tacca plant grows at Zanzibar, and is found naturalised on the
high islands of the Pacific. The art of preparing arrowroot from it is
aboriginal with the Polynesians and Feejeeans.

At Tahiti the fecula is procured by washing the tubers, scraping off
their outer skin, and then reducing them to a pulp by friction, on a
kind of rasp, made by winding coarse twine (formed of the coco-nut
fibre) regularly round a board. The pulp is washed with sea water
through a sieve, made of the fibrous web which protects the young
frond of the coco-nut palm. The strained liquor is received in a
wooden trough, in which the fecula is deposited; and the supernatant
liquor being poured off, the sediment is formed into balls, which are
dried in the sun for twelve or twenty-four hours, then broken and
reduced to powder, which is spread out in the sun further to dry. In
some parts of the world cakes of a large size are made of the meal,
which form an article of diet in China, Cochin-Caina, Travancore, &c.,
where they are eaten by the natives with some acid to subdue their
acrimony.

Some twenty varieties of the Ti plant (_Diacaena terminalis_) are
cultivated in the Polynesian islands. There is, however, but one which
is considered farinaceous and edible. In Java the root is considered a
valuable medicine in dysentery.

Within the last three or four years, considerable quantities of a
feculent substance, called Tous les mois, have been imported from the
West Indies. It is cultivated in Barbados, St. Kitts, and the French
islands, and is said to be prepared by a tedious and troublesome
process from the rhizomes of various species of _Canna Coccinea_,
_Achiras_, _glauca_, and _edulis_. It approaches more nearly to pot