Page:Voyage in search of La Perouse, volume 1 (Stockdale).djvu/416

388 in thickness. The trunk is a large cylinder filled with pith, which is interspersed, through the whole length of the trunk, with ligneous fibres, about the thirteen-thousandth part of an inch in thickness, and often above two lines distant from each other.

They pound the sago after taking it out of the tree; they then put it into bags made of a sort of canvas, furnished by the bases of the limbs of the cocoa-nut tree. On those bags they throw, from time to time, pure water, which carries off the fæculæ (or sediment), while this kind of searce, or strainer, partly retains the woody fibres.

The water replenished with the fæculæ is received into troughs, about three feet in length, formed of the lower part of the limbs of the sago tree. On the end of each trough they fasten a strainer, to retain that part of the fæculæ which has subsided, and the ligneous fibres which have escaped the first washing, swim on the water.

This last strainer required no preparation: it was of the same nature with the other; both being a fibrous contexture, which differs from our stuffs in this, that its component fibres are simply applied, and run parallel to each other throughout the whole length; but some short lateral fibres, which traverse the longitudinal ones, bind them