ltogether dispensed with, a preference is of course
given to those of well established reputation, and the class of maistries
generally is beginning to understand and appreciate the system of
registration, which has every prospect of becoming general, and will, I
need hardly add, be of great advantage to planters. But if maistries
sometimes swindle their employers, the former are often liable to be
swindled by the coolies to whom the advances have been made, and until a
system of compulsory Government registration of advances to coolies is
introduced, as recommended in one of my chapters on coffee planting in
Mysore, it will be impossible to put our peculiar system of giving
advances to coolies on a reasonably safe footing.

The plantations in Coorg have suffered, and still suffer considerably from
leaf disease and Borer, to both of which I have, for practical purposes,
sufficiently alluded in the chapter on the diseases of coffee. The
effects of the former, though entailing much injury on coffee in Coorg,
have not been so fatal as in Ceylon, as the long stretches of dry weather,
often of four or five months' duration, seem to kill off large numbers of
the spores, and so mitigate the damage arising from the disease. Messrs.
Matheson and Co., at the instance of the chemist previously mentioned,
sent out Strawsoniser spray engines for the purpose of treating afflicted
trees with various solutions, but, though good effects were noticeable on
individual trees, it was found that to treat whole estates in this way was
quite impracticable, both from the cost and the immense amount of labour
that would be required, and this fatal obstacle to the use of such
remedies has been amply proved in Ceylon. But in Coorg the Borer is much
more to be dreaded than leaf disease, and its ravages are such that even
on the best estates fully twenty-five per cent.[50] of the acreage is
under supplies (i.e., young plants to take the place of the old ones
which have died), and the late Mr. Pringle--the chemist--was of opinion
that the loss of crop from Borer was not less than 2 cwt. per acre per
annum. Before the introduction of shade the total extermination of an
estate was far from uncommon, the estate in the Bamboo district opened by
Rev. H. A. Kaundinya in 1857 being the first to perish, and though, as we
have seen, owing to the introduction of shade, the Borer has been largely
brought into subjection, considerable damage still takes place from