B. P. I.-67. »■ I- E -~ 5S - 



THE CULTURE OF THE CENTRAL AMERICAN RUBBER 



TREE. 



INTRODUCTION. 



Among the more striking results of the industrial progress of the 

 nineteenth century was the rapid multiplication of the uses of rubber 

 and an ever-increasing demand for the raw material. For several 

 decades the world's needs were met by the Para district of eastern 

 Brazil, but with steadily advancing prices as an inducement the entire 

 Amazon Valley, and indeed all tropical regions of both hemispheres, 

 have been ransacked in search of additional wild supplies. It is not 

 yet true, as sometimes represented, that the natural product is 

 exhausted or that a rubber famine is to be anticipated at an early 

 date. Within the last decade the value of good grades of rubber 

 passed from the neighborhood of 25 cents to a dollar and upward per 

 pound, and the rubber-gathering industry met with an expansion suffi- 

 ciently rapid to more than keep pace with the demand, so that a period 

 of somewhat more moderate prices has ensued. But with a steady 

 increase in the use of rubber in the arts and no very general improve- 

 ment in the destructive methods of gathering the wild product, it is to 

 be expected that this respite will be brief and that the question of the 

 world's future supply will soon become more acute. 



The preservation of the wild rubber forests is naturally receiving 

 more and more attention in the countries in which they are so impor- 

 tant a source of wealth, but measures of safety are least likely to be 

 applied in the very remote and unexploited districts where they would 

 do the most good. Rubber is still very largely a product of savage 

 rather than of civilized industry; in fact, it is now by far the most 

 important contribution of barbarous races to our industrial civiliza- 

 tion. While this continues to be the fact there will be little change in 

 the careless and wasteful methods of the past, but the appreciation of 

 rubber forests as permanent sources of income may be expected to 

 increase, so that the continued advance in the price of rubber no longer 

 means merely the rapid extinction of wild rubber trees, but implies 

 also increased interest in the protection and improvement of the more 

 productive natural forests. Such a tendency is already manifest, 



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