countries it grows. Within the past
decade chemical science has produced from the cocoanut a series of
food products whose manufacture has revolutionized industry and placed
the business of the manufacturer and of the producer upon a plane of
prosperity never before enjoyed.

There has also been a great advance in the processes by which the
new oil derivatives are manufactured. The United States took the
initiative with the first recorded commercial factories in 1895. In
1897 the Germans established factories in Mannheim, but it remained
for the French people to bring the industry to its present perfection.

According to the latest reports of the American consul at Marseilles,
the conversion of cocoanut oil into dietetic compounds was undertaken
in that city in 1900, by Messrs. Rocca, Tassy and de Roux, who in
that year turned out an average of 25 tons per month. During the year
just closed (1902) their average monthly output exceeded 6,000 tons
and, in addition to this, four or five other large factories were
all working together to meet the world's demand for "vegetaline,"
"cocoaline," or other products with suggestive names, belonging to
this infant industry.

These articles are sold at gross price of 18 to 20 cents per kilo to
thrifty Hollandish and Danish merchants, who, at the added cost of a
cent or two, repack them in tins branded "Dairy Butter" and, as such,
ship them to all parts of the civilized world. It was necessary to
disguise the earlier products by subjecting them to trituration with
milk or cream; but so perfect is the present emulsion that the plain
and unadulterated fats now find as ready a market as butter. These
"butters" have so far found their readiest sale in the Tropics.

The significance of these great discoveries to the cocoanut planter can
not be overestimated, for to none of these purely vegetable fats do the
prejudices attach that so long and seriously have handicapped those
derived from animal margarin or margarin in combination with stearic
acid, while the low fusion point of pure dairy butters necessarily
prohibits their use in the Tropics, outside of points equipped with
refrigerating plants. The field, therefore, is practically without
competition, and the question will no longer be that of finding a
market, but of procuring the millions of tons of copra or oil that
this one industry will annually absorb in the immediate future.

Cocoanut oil was once used extensively in the manu