70 



THE INDIA RUBBER WORLD 



[December i, 1905. 



proper to criticize such reports as involving unfairness to 

 many worthy undertakings, and to ask a suspension of 

 judgment until reports could be made as the result of more 

 careful investigation. Some time ago Mr. Cook, of the 

 staff of the department of agriculture, as the result of ob- 

 servations in Mexico, prepared a report, the publication of 

 which as an official bulletin committed the Washington 

 government to the favorable recognition of rubber culture, 

 though it did not fail to point out that the indiscriminate 

 planting of rubber cannot be universally successful — just 

 as it might have pointed out that if every farmer bored for 

 oil on his own premises there might not be a liberal yield 

 of petroleum in every case. 



A staff correspondent of the Mexican .^tva/i/ contributed 

 recently to that journal a series of letters purporting to 

 record his observations during a tour of the Mexican rub- 

 ber belt, in the course of which he found a number of cul- 

 tivated plantations under American auspices which he re- 

 garded as most promising, while in other cases he found 

 less encouraging conditions, and some enterprises he did 

 not deem worth longer keeping up. Reference was made 

 also to a number of Mexican owned plantations on a small 

 scale, which, while not conducted systematically, had given 

 favorable results, some of them for a number of years. 



The issue of Daily Consular and Trade Reports of Novem- 

 ber 14 includes an advance publication of portions of the 

 annual report of ^fr. Parsons, the United States consul 

 general at Mexico, who had been understood to be making 

 personal observations in the rubber planting belt. While 

 Mr. Parsons is particular throughout to urge caution in 

 making investments of any kind without proper considera- 

 tion of all the circumstances, we may suggest that this 

 tendency in his report renders the following extracts from 

 it all the more a vindication of the advocates of rubber 

 planting : 



Successful Cultivation of Rubber. — Again, the culture of rubber 

 {Caslilha elastica) is already a commercial success to a limited but grow- 

 ing extent, as proved absolutely by my inspection of Mexican planta- 

 tions owned by natives who are now cropping rubber from cultivated 

 trees. Rubber culture, like sugar culture, is profitable provided soil, 

 climate, and other conditions are favorable, and plantations are managed 

 honestly and well. But rubber growing, too, is now suffering because 

 these conditions have been disregarded, and it will suffer still more when 

 it becomes known how many of the circa 50,000,000 cultivated rubber 

 trees in Mexico can amount to little or nothing because they were planted 

 under unsatisfactory condition. 



Our readers have been kept informed of the unfortunate 

 circumstances attending the Ubero planting enterprises, 

 with headquarters in Boston, the effect of which has been 

 in certain quarters to create an unfavorable impression in 

 regard to rubber planting. To those who have studied the 

 matter, however, the Ubero expose will be seen to have no 

 real bearing upon the present status or the future of honest, 

 practical, rubber planting. It is evident that the squander- 

 ing at home of money subscribed for a plantation, instead 

 of Its actual investment in Mexico, is not proof that trees 

 planted on good soil and cared for properly will not yield 

 rubber at a profit. It may be added, indeed, that the in- 

 corporation of new companies for planting rubber in Mex- 

 ico has continued in the face of the Ubero developments, 



and that a very large amount of new planting has been 

 done in Mexico since the bursting of the Ubero bubble. 



Following close upon the beginning of an action at law 

 against one of the Ubero promoters, and his incarceration 

 in a Boston prison, we find in the Traveler of that city a 

 lengthy interview with a New England man, who is the 

 owner of a private plantation in Mexico and an officer of a 

 large plantation company also with headquarters in Boston, 

 with statements in regard to the results attained on the two 

 plantations, and on a half dozen others in the same Mexi- 

 can state, in terms capable of verification, and of such a 

 character, if verified, as to prove most encouraging to in- 

 vestors in rubber planting whose money has been judi- 

 ciously applied. Figures are given in regard to the yields 

 from young planted rubber trees, and in regard to the 

 quality of the product, which indicate that if the trees 

 continue to grow as well as they have done hitherto, the 

 enterprises will not fail in due time to prove so profitable 

 that as a result we may see before many years such a 

 " boom " as is now in progress in respect of rubber in the 

 British colonies. 



COLOMBIAN RUBBER. 



T^HIS is such a large world that the average man, de- 

 ■*■ voting his major energies to providing for himself 

 and his own, may be pardoned for a lack of familiarity with 

 all the many lands which lie beyond his particular national 

 domain. One of the least known countries — to the aver- 

 age man — is the South American republic of Colombia. 

 Though two and a half times as large as the German em- 

 pire, Colombia, by reason of its newness and the sparseness 

 of its population and as yet undeveloped wealth, remains a 

 practically unknown country to all except the more imme- 

 diate neighbors of this aspiring republic. But Colombia 

 deserves our consideration, if for no other reason, on ac- 

 count of its rubber resources, which are excelled perhaps 

 only in the vastly larger expanse of Brazil. 



There was a time, indeed, when the United States of Amer- 

 ica derived more rubber from Colombia than from the re- 

 gions of the mighty Amazon, and at a time when Colombia 

 was exporting rubber to Europe as well. The source of sup- 

 plies then under contribution was speedily depleted, how- 

 ever, and other rubber fields were found more accessible 

 than the Colombian interior, which has never yet been 

 thoroughly explored. But today the world's need for rub- 

 ber is so pressing that regions hitherto unknown or tem- 

 porarily forgotten are bound to be considered, and it may 

 be that in this era of automobiles and the manifold indus- 

 tries in which rubber is indispensable, the key may be forth, 

 coming which will unlock to the outside world a reserve of 

 wealth in Colombia which has not been realized even by 

 the most sanguine of her own people. 



The area which supplied the large shipments of rubber 

 from that country a half century ago is small as compared 

 with the whole republic. Besides, there is a possibility 

 that the regions yet unexplored commercially there possess 

 an infinitely richer supply of rubber than that which was 

 so ruthlessly tapped in the earlier days of rubber exploita- 



