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investigation, more scientific work in regard to the factors 
that may possibly be concerned in this matter of variability; 
and here I would plead that this investigation will hardly 
benefit—immediately, at all events—any one group of planters 
or any one association that may be doing scientific work on 
the subject. We must, I think, if we are to achieve our ends 
in the shortest time, throw our results into a pool. There 
must be, at least on such fundamental questions as variability, 
and of the ultimate factors concerned in the quality of planta- 
tion rubber—there must be, if we are ‘to achieve our ends as 
quickly as we should, an interchange of results between 
different workers in the subject. There has been in the past, 
I think, too much secrecy with regard to the conduct of work 
on these more fundamental issues of the rubber industry. The 
quality of rubber, the ultimate quality, and its variability, are 
dependent so far as we know upon such extraordinarily subtle 
considerations—the character and state of aggregation of the 
caoutchouc, and so forth—that it must inevitably mean that 
a large amount of scientific work will have to be dune, and will 
have to be freely exchanged between the different scientific 
workers, and discussed between them, if we are to put the 
industry on a stable basis. With regard to the question of 
how the variability is to be attacked, we have had an extremely 
interesting suggestion made in recent months for the founda- 
tion of a testing station. Now I think, contrary to the remarks 
of the last speaker, that what is the most urgent and important 
requirement of the present day in regard to the question of 
rubber is that we shall get over the question of variability 
before we begin to direct our attention more particularly to 
achieve high quality, and it is from the point of view of attack- 
ing this question of variability that that testing station will be 
chiefly valuable at present. When a manufacturer is able, by 
consulting the figures, to see the results obtained for different 
lots of rubber at the testing station, when he is able to pick 
out samples from the monthly or fortnightly returns, and to 
have before him all the other figures which would be produced 
according to the scheme which Dr. Schidrowitz laid before the 
Rubber Growers’ Association, when he is able week after week 
to pick out samples of rubber which he knows will behave 
exactly in the same way, we shall have done a great deal to 
attack the question of variability. But also remember, not only 
must the question be attacked at this end, but it must be very 
vigorously attacked in the East. It would be a mistake, I 
think, to lay the sole emphasis on the question of the advis- 
ability of selling rubber at this end according to the results 
obtained at the testing station. We must make vigorous 
research into the factors concerned in variability, by each 
