From October to March, during the dry season, the natives are engaged in stacking their corn into mud-walled granaries, and threshing what they require for immediate use. These months are also spent in repairing the damage done to the villages, grass being cut and tied into bundles for thatching roofs, and making new zana matting. The dry season is also the hunting season, when the long grass has been laid low by fire. This grass-burning is an annual institution, although the Government has given orders prohibiting it on account of the damage done to trees. But the hill tribes care very little for trees or grass, and a good deal for meat. As in all parts where the tsetse fly prevails, and the employment of cattle for ploughing is impossible, the land is chiefly cultivated with the hoe; and as the West African hoe is a tool which calls for the exercise of patience rather than skill or strength, the native leaves the field work to his women. From this form of servitude the women will not be emancipated until cattle are rendered immune from tsetse fly and the hoe is supplanted by the plough. PLANTATION CULTIVATION. The Cameroons were regarded by the Germans as a plantation country of the highest promise, and the proximity of the Cameroon Mountain to the coast, facilitating the realisation of the products, render this part of the colony an ideal area for the planter. All the largest plantations are situated in this district, which has been extensively developed, and its products have already assumed considerable proportions in the export statistics of the dependency. The laying out of a plantation in Cameroon is by no means an easy task, as the fertile soil must be drawn from the primeval forest. And as the Cameroon primeval forest has no equal for vastness and impenetrability, laborious and costly preliminary work is necessary before any real planting can be attempted. On the whole it is very much the same as in East Africa, with the distinction that as a rule in the latter colony there is only the so-called bush to clear, while in Cameroon one has to deal with high-grown primeval forest.