213 

 POSSIBILITIES OF RUBBER PRODUCTION. 



"West Indian rubber planters have awakened to the fact that 

 quite a number of their trees, believed to be pure Hevea Brasil- 

 iensis, are hybrids. This has caused the planters not a little dis- 

 tress, because these particular hybrids are much less productive 

 of good rubber than the pure Hevea," says the- India Rubber 

 World; "but it serves once more to bring up the general subject 

 of hybridization, with its natural suggestion of the possibility of 

 such hybridization, or cross fertilization or grafting, as will en- 

 able some variety of the rubber-producing tree to be grown in 

 the more southerly sections of the United States. 



"It is doubtful if a botanically pure Hevea Brasiliensis actually 

 exists. There are twenty varieties of the Hevea along the 

 Amazon ; there are seven or eight varieties of Manihot in the 

 most easterly part of Brazil ; and of Castilloas there are, north of 

 the Amazon, probably twenty different varieties. Which of these 

 many varieties represents the pure parent stock — if any of them 

 does — it is impossible to tell. Hybridization seems to be the 

 general law in the rubber family, and if it could be directed in 

 such a way as to produce a rubber tree capable of withstanding 

 such temperatures as we have in our more southerly States, a 

 vast field for rubber planting would be opened at once. 



"The advantages of such rubber planting are too obvious to 

 need enumeration. The most conspicuous may be referred to in 

 a few words — the utilization of great tracts of land now prac- 

 tically going to waste ; the easy solution of the labor, provision 

 and sanitation problems that are so difficult in the Amazon coun- 

 try ; a great decrease in transportation charges ; freedom from 

 exacting duties. All these and many other advantages point to 

 the great desirability, if practicable, of rubber growing in our 

 own country. 



"On the face of it. it does not seem necessarily impracticable. 

 There are several plants indigenous to the United States that are 

 quite closely related to the varieties of the rubber tree. Our or- 

 dinary milk weed, of which there are some fifty different kinds 

 in the United States, is a cousin of the Hevea Brasiliensis, and 

 some of its varieties, particularly those in Florida, that attain the 

 size of a tree, bear something of a family resemblance." 



WOODLOTS ON FARMS. 



"Growing a Woodlot from Seed" is the subject of an article 

 in American Forestry for June written by J. A. Ferguson of the 

 University of Missouri. Part of it deals with this very subject 

 Mr. Cox has mentioned, and says : 



"Every farm should have a woodlot to furnish fuel, fence posts 

 and other wood material needed. Especially is this true in the 

 less wooded regions like the prairies, where wood ]iroducts must 



