WATT, George. The Pests and Blights of the Tea Plant (Second Edition). Calcutta, Office of the Superintendent, Government Printing, India,1903.
8vo. Original publisher's cloth, gilt lettering to spine; pp. xv, 428, illustrated with plates after drawings and photographs; cloth marked, clearly traces of use, but still intact.
Completely re-written and updated second edition. An exhaustive and important work on the welfare of tea plants by the author of the definitive 10-volume Dictionary of the Commercial Products of India (1889-90). Sir George Watt (1851-30) was a medical doctor who was trained at the Universities of Aberdeen and Glasgow. He accepted a medical post in India largely so that he could follow his love of botany. This second edition was considerably enlarged, and, as it says in the preface, ‘almost entirely re-written’. It not only describes and suggests many solutions to the pests and blights of the tea plant, but at length takes a wider view of the whole husbandry of tea production from a practical and scientific standpoint. It became the tea planters’ bible. - This is a rare survival: a handbook for tea planters in Assam and the Kangra Valley, used by a planter.
Provenance: Ownership signature of J. Thomson Allen of Rakwana, Ceylon, whose family had a tea estate there. The book bears a bookseller’s label on the rear endpaper of Plate Ltd. Colombo, Kandy and Nuwara Eliya, a company from Bristol, Ceylon, founded in 1900 and specialising in photography, artists’ materials, stationery and books.
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