CHAPTER V 
TROPICAL EXPLOITATION, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE 
TO RUBBER 
By J. C. WILLIS, M.A., Sc.D. 
Late Director of Botanic Gardens, Ceylon, and Rio de Janeiro 
To deal fully with tropical exploitation in an hour 
is an obvious impossibility. I shall endeavour to indi- 
cate the general principles which underlie its practice, 
and illustrate my remarks especially by the case of 
rubber, which has come into such prominence in recent 
years, and with which I have had much to do, both in 
tropical Asia and in South America. 
Agriculture does not proceed by haphazard; we talk 
about things as determined by chance, but that simply 
means by causes which as yet we do not fully, if at all, 
understand. But we are gradually coming to com- 
prehend with reasonable clearness the chief causes which 
are responsible for agricultural progress, and so it 
becomes possible for those concerned with the govern- 
ment of a country to act so as best to encourage it. 
At first agricultural progress, if progress it can be 
called, was dependent only upon one or two factors, 
but as time went on it became dependent upon the 
action of more and more. The incoming of the new 
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