pi Wye CAOUTCHOUC AND GUTTA-PERCHA. 
removal of this inconvenience gave an expansion formerly unthought of to this 
branch of industry, which became manifest at the world exhibitions of London, | 
New York, and Paris, in 1842. The importation of caoutchouc into England 
amounted to 750,000 pounds; and about the time of the London Exhibition one 
South American port alone exported yearly no less than 4,000 hundred-weight. 
By what means this rapid change was consummated may be described in another 
place; here we find it more convenient to introduce the lately discovered com- 
panion of caoutchoue. ‘The manufacturing processes of both are almost identical, 
and are therefore to be treated in conjunction. 
During one of his travels in the Hast Indies, Montgomery, surgeon of the Sin- 
gapore Kast India Company, entered into conversation with a Malay Iaborer. 
While talking, he observed the handle of a hoe, and he heard with surprise 
that its substance, however hard it appeared to be, could be softened by 
immersion into hot water, and could thereupon assume and preserve any desired 
shape. The experiment being immediately made, the assertion of the Malay 
was fully confirmed. On further inquiry that excellent quality of the substance 
in question was found to have been long known among the nations of Java, 
where it was used for manufacturing canes and handles of whips, as well as of 
various other implements, and especially of knives and daggers. Montgomery 
was induced to send, in 1843, various specimens to London, and to éall public at- 
tention to the manifold uses of which the thus examined substance was capable. 
His words were more duly noticed than those of D’Almerida, who about ten 
years before had sent a similar freight to the Asiatic Society in London. The 
Society for the Encouragement of Arts and Industry bestowed a gold medal 
on Montgomery. But gutta-percha was at the same time also discovered by 
Thomas Lobb, who, in 1842-43, made a botanical journey through the Hast 
India islands. 
The new, but now already so well-known substance, is also a dried milky 
juice, in many respects resembling caoutchoue, and, therefore, considerably 
used of late as a substitute for it. The Malay name, gutta-percha, is applied 
by the natives to an inferior sort, derived from a tree as yet unknown to us, 
probably a species of fig-tree, while our gutta-percha is called gutta-taban by 
the islanders. 
The mother plant was for a time unknown until Oxley sent to Hooker, in 
England, some Gace specimens from Singapore, the principal place of 
exportation. ‘The parts of the plants were enclosed in a gutta-percha box, and 
reached thus well preserved the hands of the botanist. He recognized the plant 
to belong to the genus tsonandra, lately introduced by Wright, and to the 
family of the sapotacee, and gave it the name of isonandra gutta. Here we 
must remark that gutta is not the latin word for “drop,” but a Malay word de- 
signating “ tree’s sap.” 
The tree attains an altitude of forty, and according to some even of sixty or 
seventy feet. ‘he stem is straight, and often from three to six feet in diameter; 
its blossoms, four in a bunch, are small and white; the fruit is sweet, and yields 
a fat useful in the preparation of some kinds of food. The wood is soft, fibrous, 
and spongy ; it contains numerous oblong cavities filled with the milky juice, 
and forming broad streaks. Unfortunately the way of procuring gutta-percha 
is exceedingly crade. It is not done by making incisions in the trees, as is the 
case in gathering caoutchoue, but by felling the stem, some grown to an age of 
from fifty to a hundred years, peeling off the bark, and collecting the milky 
juice in a trough made of the stem of the musa paradisiaca, in cocoanut shells, 
&c. The juice, when spread out in thin layers, soon becomes solid in the open 
air; larger quantities are thickened by heat. The yield of a tree is said not 
to exceed thirty pounds. 
Although the tree abounds over a vast extent of territory—in the island of 
Singapore, in the forests of Jvhore, at the extremity of the Malay peninsula, 
