Apart from the porterage, purchase, putting into casks, conveying by water, final sale and shipment, which employs such numbers of natives in their respective _rôles_, there is the collection and preparation to be taken into account before a complete idea can be formed of the varied stages the palm-oil industry goes through until the product is landed on our shores. There is, first of all, the process of climbing the tree to get the fruit, which, of course, is at the top. After removing the fruit the natives are able, when the nut is properly ripe, to shake it out of the spiky casing in which it grows. The nut is something like a plum-stone, only bigger, and contains the oil to the thickness of about one-eighth of an inch. Inside is the kernel, itself enclosed in a very hard shell. To extract the oil the outer skin or shell has to be split or peeled off. The nuts are usually flung into an old canoe, the natives trampling upon and crushing the outer skin, and then put into boiling water, which brings the oil to the surface. But there are a good many ways of preparing the oil, and its different characteristics were at one time supposed to be due to different ways of preparation on various parts of the coast. That does not appear to be the opinion now, for the theory is hardly sufficient to account for the extra quantity of glycerine such as is met with in Bonny and Old Calabar oil, and the larger proportion of stearine[62] which exists in the hard kinds of Brass and New Calabar. We have now come to an end of the history of the collection of palm-oil, and the second use to which the oil-palm lends itself arrives upon the scene. [Illustration: FILLING PALM-OIL BARRELS, SOUTHERN NIGERIA] With the breakage of the nut and the extraction of the oil, there is left the kernel in its covering. The kernel trade did not become general[63] until a few years ago, the kernel being usually either left to decay or to reproduce, and for a considerable time it was pointed out that hundreds of thousands of pounds were annually lost in this way. But within a comparatively recent time the natives have been induced to break the hard shell in which the kernel is enclosed, and the latter are shipped home in yearly increasing quantities from Nigeria by the merchants, who dispose of them to the African Oil Mills[64] or some other seed-crushing establishment in Liverpool, or send them to Hamburg: Germany, as already stated, being the largest buyer. The kernel yields an oil which in its concrete form is white in contrast with the yellowy-red or deep red or ochre colouring of the oil in the nut itself, and is the principal ingredient in Sunlight and other soaps of a similar character. In its chemical properties it is almost identical with the oil pressed from the inside of the cocoa-nut—_i.e._ copra—which is known as “cocoa-nut oil.” It is exclusively used in the manufacture of soap.