Professor Wyndham Dunstan has stated that the oil palm “does not occur thickly much beyond 200 miles from the coast.” Since those words were written we have learnt that whole forests of the oil palm exist over a thousand miles from the coast. It thrives throughout West Africa wherever the atmosphere is sufficiently humid, but it loves best of all the swampy valleys of Sherboro Island and Nigeria, the cocoa farms of San Thomé, the Gold Coast and the Congo, which are by it provided with the necessary protection from the scorching sun and from the fierce tornadoes which sweep periodically over the land. In the strictest sense the oil palm has never yet been an object of cultivation in West Africa, neither is it in the literal sense self-propagating. The housewife, separating the fibrous pericarp from the nuts, tosses the latter aside or scatters the residue on to the rubbish heap behind the hut, with the inevitable result of an early and vigorous crop of young palms. In the course of time the inhabitants of the village, according to African custom, pick up not only their beds, but also their huts, and walk, perhaps something less than a mile away, where they clear another piece of forest land and build up another village. The old site, thus abandoned to nature, is quickly covered with vigorous growth, but in the race for supremacy the graceful palms lead the way and become the communal property of the former inhabitants. The screeching grey parrot of West Africa with its horny bill tears the oily fruit from the bunch, after consuming most of the oleaginous fibres of the pericarp, drops the nuts whilst flying, far and wide. These, in turn, add to Africa’s economic wealth, and thus do man and animal join in spreading through ever wider regions the growth of the oil palm. Within ten years the tree begins to push out its bunches of fruit, beginning with tiny bunches of the size, shape and appearance of an ordinary bunch of black grapes. Some trees bear in eight years, and an earlier date still is claimed for certain varieties, but the fruit at this stage seldom yields any appreciable quantity of oil. From fifteen onwards to a hundred and twenty years, the palm plantations give forth an almost continuous supply of fruit, every tree bearing twice a year. In the rainy season the supply is most abundant, but in the second period, known by many as the “short wet” season there is a fair secondary harvest. All the trees do not, however, bear at the same time, and in many areas of the Equatorial regions where the seasons are not sharply defined or always regular, the supply of nuts is never exhausted.