66 RUBBER 



"June, 1876, was a time of commotion at Kew, as 

 they were compelled to turn out orchid and propa- 

 gating houses for service, and to make room for the 

 sudden and all-unexpected inroad of the Hevea ; but 

 Sir Joseph was not a little pleased. The Hevea did 

 not fail to respond to the care I had bestowed on them. 

 A fortnight afterwards the glass-houses at Kew 

 afforded (to me) a pretty sight — tier upon tier — rows 

 of young Hevea plants, 7,000 and odd of them."* 



CHAPTER XII 



HISTORIC DEVELOPMENTS 



When the Para seedlings were ready to be transplanted 

 into the open, India could not afford to adopt them. 

 So the majority of them were sent to Ceylon, and small 

 batches to Burma, Java, and Singapore. The West 

 Indies, too, were given a few to experiment with, but 

 the seeds had been obtained specially for the purpose 

 of introducing Para rubber into the East, so naturally 

 the seedlings were nearly all distributed throughout 

 the Eastern Tropics. 



Most of the seedlings that went to Ceylon were 

 planted in the Botanic Gardens at Heneratgoda, near 

 Colombo, which were specially opened in the low- 

 country region as an experimental centre of rubber 

 cultivation. A few of them, however, were given a 

 home in the island's world-famous Gardens at Pera- 

 deniya, in the up-country neighbourhood of Kandy. 

 The plants at Heneratgoda flowered for the first time 



* " On the Plantation, Cultivation, and Curing of Para Indian 

 Rubber," by H. A. Wickham (Kegan Paul, Trench, Triibner 

 and Co.). 



