The native women and children gather the fruit twice each day, except Sundays, from under the trees and carry them into the boucan, barn, or sheds, made of brick with terraced roofs, rejecting the outer shell or husk. In the Straits Settlement, if the trees are not too high (the highest tree not being over thirty-five feet on Penang Island), the nuts are beaten off by means of long bamboo poles. In the Banda Islands the fruit is gathered by the use of a neat oval bamboo basket, partly open at the top, furnished with a couple of prongs. With these prongs the harvester catches the fruit stalk and by a gentle pull causes the nuts to fall into the basket, which will hold three or four. By using this method the mace will not be bruised as it would be by falling to the ground, and they have a skin more free from blemish, and it is thinner compared with the fruit and of a well-uniformed proportion. The outer shell or husk, which is harder than that of a filbert, is removed by one man placing the nuts on a sort of a drum head and another beating them with a flat board, a process which will not bruise the nuts. One man will beat out as many in this way as six men can do in the way which is employed at the Straits. After the envelope of the curious, red-colored network (mace) is taken off the nutmegs are placed in receptacles which have fine wire-mesh bottoms, made of splints, called by the natives neebongs, to allow the air to pass through, or, by being elevated above each other, they are kept before a fire for a month or more, the first elevated being about ten feet from the ground. After this they are exposed to the sun two hours each day for two or three days until they rattle inside the shell when shaken. They cannot be removed when green without damage to the nut. They are then cracked by beating with great care, as hard blows would cause a black spot on the nuts, affecting the sale. They are then assorted into three grades, the finest are exported, the second are reserved for home consumption, and the third grade, made up of small, damaged, or unripe stock, are burned or used for nutmeg butter. Nutmegs are often affected by black spots or gangrene on the outer covering, caused by an insect, which deposits its larvæ on it in the husk and feeds on the saccharine matter of the outer covering until it bursts, when it makes its way into the soft nut itself. The number one nutmegs are put up in half piculs (heavy-made boxes) containing sixty to sixty-five pounds. The ovate nutmeg seed is marked with impressions like the lobes or arillus (mace) which covers it, one side being of a paler hue and slightly flattened, and having the shape of the outer shell, with corresponding dimensions in size, the largest being about one inch long by eight-tenths of an inch broad. Four such nuts will weigh one ounce. They are of a grayish or brown color, but they are coarsely furrowed and longitudinally veined, and are marked on the flatter side with a shallow groove.