Meat, fish and fowl are all of them stewed in palm oil, and, as African meat is deficient in fat, the palm oil makes an excellent and appetizing substitute. I once smelled a very savoury native “hot pot” which, upon examination, revealed a wonderful mixture. The liquid was golden with palm oil, and floating about, adding to the compendium of flavours, I detected bats and beetles, a flat fish “cheek by jowl” with a monkey’s head, caterpillars fitting themselves in with sections of field rats and parrots—altogether a stew delightful to the nostrils, at least of the African boys and girls who squatted around the huge clay cooking pot. The white man, though he usually has no keen appetite for native stews or pottage, lunches and dines off “palm oil chop” with as great a relish as does his Indian confrère upon “curries.” The “chop” may be fish, flesh or fowl, but it all goes by the name “palm oil chop,” which has a happy and almost essential knack in West Africa of hiding a multitude of “foreign bodies.” No African meal can be regarded as complete without the addition of palm oil, and, as a beverage, palm wine is extensively though moderately consumed. This sparkling beverage closely resembles in appearance the “stone ginger” of civilization. The tribes on the Upper Kasai are probably the greatest consumers of palm wine in Africa. In those parts of the tropics where quantities of sugar cane are cultivated, palm wine competes with a sister product from the cane; the sweet and somewhat insipid taste of the latter being more palatable to some tribes than the sharp flavour of the palm wine. The Eloeis wine is the sap of the palm tree itself, extracted by various means, generally by cutting off the male flower-spike and fixing a calabash to the wound to catch the juice which is removed every morning. Another method is to remove the palm cabbage or head; yet another, to cut down the tree and “dig” a hole in the heart of the trunk, from which the liquid is then scooped into a calabash or earthenware pot. Europeans generally prefer the wine when fresh from the tree, owing to the fact that after a few hours it begins to ferment and loses its sweetness. The oil palms of West Africa are taking an increasing share in supplying the temporal wants of both the white and the coloured man. It is safe to say that there is no tree in the universe capable of providing to so great and varied an extent, the daily wants of the human organism. [Illustration: FINE HEADS OF OIL PALM FRUIT.] II THE PRODUCTION OF RUBBER