Another extract made in India from the wood of _Acacia Catechu_,[29] and which bears the name of Cutch or “Kutt,” is used in combination with the betel nut. The trees are cut down, and the heart-wood chopped and boiled in water, strained off, and evaporated. This is poured into clay moulds and dried in the sun. Dr. Hooker gives a sketch from the life of one of the native “Kutt” makers of India:—— “At half-past eight a.m. it suddenly fell calm, and we proceeded to Chakuchee, the native carts breaking down in their passage over the projecting beds of flinty rocks, or as they hurried down the inclined planes which cut through the precipitous banks of the streams. Near Chakuchee we passed an alligator, just killed by two men—a foul beast about nine feet long, and of the Mager kind. More interesting than its natural history was the painful circumstance of its having just swallowed a child that was playing in the water, while its mother was washing her domestic utensils in the river. The brute was hardly dead, much distended by its prey, and the mother standing beside it. A very touching group was this! the parent with hands clasped in agony, unable to withdraw her eyes from the cursed reptile, which still clung to life with that tenacity for which its tribe is so noted, and beside her the two men leaning on their bloody bamboo staves with which they had all but despatched the animal. “The poor woman who had lost her child earns a scanty maintenance by making catechu. She inhabits a little cottage, and has no property but her two oxen to bring wood from the hills, and a very few household chattels, and how few these are is known only to persons who have seen the meagre furniture of the Dangha hovels. Her husband cuts the trees in the forest and drags them to the hut, but he is now sick, and her only son, her future stay, was he whose end is just related. Her daily food is rice, with beans from the beautiful flowered dolichos, trailing round the cottage, and she is in debt to the contractor, who has advanced her two rupees, to be worked off in three months, by the preparation of 240 lbs. of catechu. The present was her second husband, an old man; by him she never had any children, and in this respect alone did the poor creature think herself very unfortunate, for her poverty she did not feel. Rent to the Rajah, tax to the police, and rates to the Brahminee priest, are all paid from an acre of land, yielding so wretched a crop of barley, that it more resembled a fallow field than a harvest field. All day long she is boiling down the catechu-wood cut into chips, and pouring the decoction into large wooden troughs, where it is inspissated.”