One explanation given for the failure of Messrs. Lever Brothers’ effort in Sierra Leone was that they did not offer a sufficiently high price for the oil palm fruit heads to induce the natives to collect and carry them to the factory. As the chiefs and villagers saw that by selling the fruits to the factory the main occupation of their wives (the preparation of palm oil and the cracking of nuts for the extraction of palm kernels) would be taken away, they were said to be averse to the establishment of a new condition of enforced idleness, which would impose greater difficulties on them of keeping their wives in order. The offer by the factory to return the nuts for cracking in the villages, did not dispose of this difficulty, as the villagers only saw in it an arrangement involving them in extra transport. Messrs. Lever Brothers have now transferred their work to the Belgian Congo, where, by reason of the better type of palm fruit commonly obtainable, the conditions are more satisfactory for the development of the mechanical extraction of palm oil on a commercial scale, and where the inhabitants are less independent and more accustomed to co-operate with European enterprise. =Export Figures.=—The average annual export of palm oil and kernels for the first nine years of the century, and the annual total of the subsequent ten years are given: Palm oil Palm kernels Year Gallons Tons 1900-1908 Av. 303,790 26,630 1909 851,998 42,897 1910 645,339 43,031 1911 725,648 42,892 1912 728,509 50,751 1913 617,088 49,201 1914 436,144 35,915 1915 481,576 39,624 1916 557,751 45,316 1917 543,111 58,020 1918 260,442 40,816 =RUBBER.=—Until 1907 the African tree rubber (_Funtumia elastica_) had not been recorded from any part of the country, although its congener, _F. africana_, was found everywhere. A number of trees of the first-named species have been recently discovered in the Panguma and Gola forests, and have been carefully examined. The latex, from trees tapped in the former locality, yielded a good quality of rubber when boiled with three volumes of water.