RUB BEE 443 



RUBBEK: WILD, PLANTATION AND SYNTHETIC 



By Dr. JOHN WADDELL 



SCHOOL OF MINING, QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY 



AN industry can not be wholly uninteresting which involves the con- 

 sumption yearly of about $250,000,000 worth of raw material in 

 the production of goods worth $750,000,000 which has grown to nearly 

 double its size in seven years, which involves the cultivation of three 

 quarters of a million acres or more of land, worth about $130 an acre, 

 but half of which has during a boom been capitalized at double its value, 

 an industry whose center will be speedily shifted from the banks of the 

 Amazon, half way round the world, to Ceylon and the Malay State?, 

 unless very heroic measures are taken to prevent it, among which heroic 

 measures the importation of 50,000 Chinese coolies into the Amazon 

 valley has been suggested. 



Such is the rubber industry. When it is added that the price, which 

 for a number of years had been a little above a dollar a pound, went up 

 during 1910 to over three dollars and last September fell as low as fifty 

 cents ; and that in connection with the rubber trade there have been some 

 of the most sensational stories of inhumanity and barbarity in the Congo 

 district and on the upper Amazon, it will be seen that the economist and 

 the social reformer must be specially interested. 



There are, too, features of interest for the botanist, since rubber is 

 got from plants and its function in the plant is obscure. Moreover, there 

 are notable peculiarities in its extraction which offer opportunities for 

 further research. The chemist is interested not only from Jhe point of 

 view of the conversion of the raw product into a material suitable for the 

 many purposes to which it is applied, but also from the fact that he sees 

 here one more opportunity to replace the work of nature and to do in a 

 small laboratory covering only a few acres what now requires thousands 

 of square miles. 



A book appeared in Spain early in the seventeenth century (1601-15) 

 describing the voyages of the Castillians, from 1492-1554, in which a 

 game played by the natives of Hayti with balls made from the gum of 

 a tree was mentioned. About the same time* Juan de Torquemada 

 described a rubber tree of Mexico, the Castilloa elastica, and stated that 

 the Indians used the rubber for medicinal purposes and that the Span- 

 iard used it for waterproofing coats. Rubber trees of various kinds were 

 soon discovered in Brazil, French Guiana, Madagascar and other places. 



Chemists attempted to find industrial uses for the product of the 

 rubber tree, and it may be added that the search in the future is likely 



