47 



1 on o enough in work to say this. The account ol insect and fungoid 

 pests is not quite up to dale, and the statement that the Platypus 

 beetle causes a certain amount of damage to trees in the Straits 

 Settlements is somewhat misleading. The insect only attacks dead 

 wood, and will not touch living trees, but more or less hurries up 

 the death ol a dying tree. No allusion is made to the canker 

 fungus, or the more serious Fomes semitostus, nor to the leaf-fungi, 

 and even Termes Gestroi, is barely alluded to. Some of the numer- 

 ous tapping instruments are described, and the well known Ceylon 

 one is recommended; but this instrument is useful only for trees 

 which have never previously been tapped. It has been found quite 

 useless for old trees, as the bark becomes too hard and irregular for 

 its use. It would have been as well to have explained this. The 

 author gives a long quotation from 1 )r. Weber as to the coagulation 

 of rubber with formaldehyde, and attempted to carry out Dr. Weber's 

 instructions with Para rubber, and met with a failure as might be 

 expected as one gathers from Dr. WEBER'S account that he was 

 working with castilloa latex. It is well known that Formaldehyde 

 will keep Para rubber latex from coagulating for man)- months. 

 He suggests smoking the biscuits which has long been done, but 

 somehow manufacturers st em to prefer them unsmoked, and states 

 that artificial heat is not absolutely essential, but hastens the drying 

 process which it does but as unless very slight ruins the rubber and 

 it would have been better to warn planters against using it at all. 

 Taken as a whole the book is a very useful little one for beginners, 

 and contains a number of useful hints. New methods and processes 

 for this work are constantly being discovered or suggested and per- 

 haps a later edition will be full of the very latest information. 



RUBBER TAPPING 



Amherst, Power Burma ii, 

 January 2ist, /goj. 



The Editor, 



Agricultural Bulletin of S. S. and 

 F. M. S., Singapore. 



Dear SIR, — Referring to the instructive experiments on rubber 

 tapping by Mr. MACHADO in March, April, and again in the latter 

 part of May which were not so satisfactory as the previous tappings 

 owing to the trees being in bloom, I certainly think that you have 

 solved the problem of getting the largest yield with the least injury 

 to the tree, for young trees especially, and also of distributing the 

 labor supply which is a very important point to be looked at in the 

 near future. At the same time may I suggest that there were one 

 or two drawbacks to its complete success in proving the value of this 

 method of tapping, i. e., 



