6 ECONOMIC BOTANY AND THE NEW FLORAS 



collected, about a dozen plants were raised at Kew and sent to 

 Calcutta, but all died. Then in 1876 Mr. H. A, Wickham was 

 sent out by the Kew authorities. He found the best trees 

 growing not in the swamps beside the rivers, but upon the up- 

 lands, and therefore insisted on Hevea being treated as a forest 

 tree, planted not more than forty to the acre. As in the case of 

 the Cinchona, a government jealous of its monopoly might have 

 raised difficulties had it been certain that the seeds collected 

 could have started a rival industry ; but the previous experi- 

 ment had failed, and Mr. Wickham's 70,000 seeds, specially 

 designated for delivery to Her Britannic Majesty's Eoyal 

 Gardens at Kew, passed unchallenged. 



This time the experiment was successful. From the 70,000 

 seeds, some 2800 plants were raised and sent to Ceylon, where 

 their cultivation was studied and new seeds in turn sent out 

 by Dr. Thwaites to Fiji, Queensland and Sydney, Jamaica 

 and Trinidad, Java and Zanzibar, to be the foundation of the 

 new rubber industry. 



Thirty years later, when at length the rubber plantations 

 had become a valuable national asset, Mr. Wickham wrote to 

 Hooker as follows : 



August 10, 1906. 



Will you permit me to congratulate you on the now, at 

 last, after so many delays, development in systematic cultiva- 

 tion of the Hevea (Para) Indian Rubber ; remembering, as 

 I do, your foresight and initiative in securing the free hand 

 enabling me to bring away the original stock on which it is 

 founded, from the forests of Alto-Amazonas. 



Hooker foresaw the future of rubber from the first. Writing 

 to Lady Hooker from Trichinopoly in December 1914, Captain 

 J. S. Hooker tells how he met an ex-tea planter, a bit of a 

 botanist, who had several times been to Kew in the old days. 



He told me that if he had followed ' Lion's ' x advice when 

 he first came out in, I think, '75, as a tea planter, he would 

 have been a rich man now. ' Lion's ' parting words were, 

 ' If you take my advice you will go in for rubber.' Fancy 



1 ' Lion ' was a nickname for Sir Joseph (see p. 367). 



