After determining the sexes the cutting out of the surplus male trees should take place. Those which are to remain should be left as much on the windward side of the plantation as possible, so that the pollen may be carried by the wind to the pistils of the female trees. In this respect the parks are similar to our apple orchards. If a surplus number of male trees be left growing, they are topped, or headed down and grafted with scions from the female tree. The parkineers[3] on the Banda Islands do not expect a yield above 30 per cent. of male trees from the planted seed, and seldom so many, and they think 2 per cent. enough male trees to leave growing, while other countries look for a yield anywhere from 8 per cent. to 75 per cent. of male trees, and they estimate one male tree to eight or ten female the right proportion. ----- Footnote 3: The parkineers is a term used in the Banda Islands. The nutmeg tree is a handsome, bushy evergreen with straight and lofty undivided trunk, and with reddish-brown bark and verticillate branching head, much resembling our apple tree. It is cut back in the Straits to about twenty feet. The bark on the young branches is bright green, the dark, shining leaves, glossy on the upper surface and whitish below, are alternate, simple, and entire and oblong and obliptic and very aromatic. They are strongly veined, the petiolate being devoid of stipules or having very short foot stalks. The nutmeg tree will begin to bear when from five to six years old and will then produce from five to six pounds of nutmegs and half a pound of mace to a tree. The yield is more profitable when the tree is ten years old. The tree will continue to produce fruit at sixty years of age, and has been known to bear a crop when one hundred years old. The male tree has a much shorter life than the fruit-bearing trees. The flowers are very small and are clustered in the axils of the leaves. They are a pale yellow and have a fragrance much like that of the lily of the valley. The nuts will often split before reaching maturity, by reason of cold, damp weather and sudden changes. The nutmeg tree, like the orange, is a constant bearer, producing two crops in one year, and sometimes three, in the East. A much larger crop, however, is harvested in the later months of the year, and the smaller crops in April, May, and June, and even in July. Some are harvested every month of the year, as is the case to some extent on the Banda Islands, and they are delivered every month to the government boats. But the months especially devoted to harvesting are the same on the Banda Islands as in the Straits Settlement. From the Straits the shipments are made quarterly.