287 



"Guayule is a form of rubber extracted from the Guavule 

 plant, which grows in enormous quantities in certain of 'the 

 Northern States of Mexico, especially San Luis Potosi, Zacatecas, 

 Durango and Coahuila. 



"The name appears to be a local term and is found in none of 

 the Spanish Dictionaries. It may be a compound formed from 

 ' hule,' i.e., rubber. 



" The Guayule industry has now passed from the experimental 

 to the practical stage and is destined to attain considerable 

 importance in Northern Mexico, and under these circumstances 

 I feel that the following information which I have collected 

 regarding this new industry may be of interest. 



" Little more than two years ago the Guayule shrub was not 

 only regarded as worthless, but was looked" on as a veritable 

 scourge by the Mexican land-owners. In fact, lands thick with 

 this bush were considered worse than useless and could have been 

 had for a merely nominal sum, while now many sales of Guayule 

 on the ground have been reported at over five times the price at 

 which the land itself was valued two or three years ago. Holders 

 of tracts of these lands, who had to expend money on them for 

 taxes and other purposes, found them burdensome in the extreme. 

 Now many of these people have reaped fortunes from those same 

 waste lands. For some years ' Guayule ' had been known to 

 contain rubber, but it is only within quite a short time that a 

 process has been invented for the extraction of the gum for 

 commercial use. As long ago as 1897, a German named Henry 

 Lemcke, employed under the Mexican Ministry of Fomento, 

 acquired a knowledge of the value of the Guayule plant, known 

 then only to the Indians and a few others who discovered an 

 elastic substance in the plant when chewing it. Mr. Lemcke 

 informed the Mexican Government of his discovery and also 

 offered it to various Companies interested in the rubber industry, 

 with a view to ascertaining whether it was possible to extract a 

 good quality of rubber from the shrub. Chemists and inventors 

 began experimenting with the plant, but it was not really till 

 towards the end of the year 1904 that the buying of the shrub 

 began, at about $15 Mexican per ton. Speculation immediately 

 began, and such was the number of persons anxious to secure 

 quantities of Guayule large enough to justify them in erecting 

 factories for applying the recently discovered processes of the 

 extraction of the gum, that buyers have found it very difficult to 

 purchase the plant, and recently contracts for large lots have been 

 reported as high as $100 Mexican per ton. 



44 It is not to be expected that the gum extracted from the 

 4 Guayule' will ever take the place of rubber, but it can be used 



rubber. In itself, it is inferior to real rubber, it has very little 

 elasticity and will not bound as true rubber does, and is easily 

 broken. It contains a great deal of soft, sticky matter. Iresh 

 Guayule looks very much like old rubber which has been exposed 

 to the air for vears until it has lost its elasticity and strength. It 

 requires therefore a considerable admixture of ordinary rubber to 



