culinary nutmeg, the _Myristica Moschata_ of botanists, although at
least a score of the same genus, all unfit for human food. The
parent country of the aromatic nutmegs extends from the Molucca
Islands to New Guinea, inclusive. In this they grow with facility
and even in the Banda Islands, where there are parks of them, they
hardly undergo any cultivation, and may truly be said, even there,
to be a wild product. It is only when grown as exotics, as in the
British settlements of Pinang and Singapore, that they require
cultivation, and that a more careful and expensive one than any
other produce of the soil.

Aromatic nutmegs are sometimes large and sometimes small--sometimes
round, sometimes oblong, and sometimes long, and this will be found
the case whether cultivated or uncultivated. How, then, the Customs
are able to distinguish them it is difficult to understand. In the
ordinary Prices Current no mention whatever is made of the wild and
cultivated, the lowest quality being quoted in the most recent at
2s. per pound, and the highest at 3s. 10d.,--the best of what are
called wild fetching a higher price than the lower qualities of what
are called cultivated.

But suppose the distinction could be made with the most perfect
certainty, to make it would be a palpable departure from the
principle adopted with every other commodity, of charging a
uniform rate of duty on quality. To give an example, the present
price of black pepper is 3-5/8d. to 4d. per pound, while that of
white pepper is 81/2d. to 1s. 2d. per pound, both paying the same
duty of 6d.; yet nothing can be more easily distinguished than
these two commodities, which, except as to curing, are the same
article.

Tea is a still more striking example. The duty is the same on all
qualities, though prices range from 1l1/2d. to 3s. 6d. per pound. It
was the very circumstance of the difficulty of distinguishing
between the different kinds of tea, especially between Bohea and
Congou, which, after an eighteen months trial, overthrew the system
of rated duties of 1s. 6d., 2s., and 3s., adopted on the abolition
of the East India Company's monopoly in 1833.

Unless the duty on nutmegs is equalised there will be no end of
trouble and disputes, and however expert the Customs may be, they
will certainly be outwit