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of the soil is diminished. The natural idea of a native cultivator 

 is to go on over the same ground with the same kind of crop till 

 he cannot get any more out of it, that is till he has so exhausted the 

 soil that the plant cannot get any more food out of it. Rotation of 

 crops and heavy manuring as practised in Europe and the United 

 States are quite unknown to the native cultivator. 



This working the ground out by cultivation of Tapioca has been 

 reduced by preventing cultivators from taking too many crops from 

 the ground. 



Besides injury caused to the soil by removal of the actual salts 

 required for plant-food, tapioca has been accused of poisoning the 

 ground, by leaving something in it which is dangerous to plant-life 

 in general, and the same has been said of bananas. It is easy to 

 understand that a fungus might attack the decaying bits of Tapioca 

 root , left in the ground after removal of the crop and then attack 

 the roots of other allied plants which succeeded it. There does 

 not seem, however, to be any evidence that such an accident has 

 occurred, and I do not know that any observations have been made 

 on this poisoning of the ground said to have been produced. 



Tapioca is often grown in small patches in gardens and elsewhere 

 where one can more readily watch it, and I have never seen any 

 plants refuse to grow on ground where it has been cultivated in 

 this way. 



Can Tapioca be used for say two or three crops as a catch-crop 

 for rubber? 



When Mr. H. C. Hill, the Forest Inspector for India was here 

 in 1900, he was very enthusiastic on the subject of cultivating Para 

 rubber through secondary or scrub formation much in the same 

 way as it is necessary to cultivate Gutta percha. He urged that 

 it was a forest tree and should be grown as a forest tree and 

 deprecated the clearing of the soil completely below the trees. He 

 had had of course no experience of Para rubber, as it had always 

 failed in India where his work had lain, but he was very keen on 

 planting it through Tapioca. Mr. CURTIS and I travelling with 

 him came to an estate where this experiment had been tried. One 

 or two trees were showing good growth among the tapioca and he 

 was enthusiastic. Enquiry however elicited the fact that these were 

 the survivors of a considerable number that had been planted, the 

 rest had nearly all died, but a few wretched specimens beside the 

 bigger ones were to be seen smothered by the Tapioca. Mr. 

 CURTIS and I therefore came to a very different opinion from that 

 of Mr. HlLL, viz., that the experiment was a dead-failure, as we 

 had expected it would prove. 



The next attempts in the same line I saw was in Mr. TURNER'S 

 estate near Caledonia. The cheapness of the cultivation was a good 

 deal in its favour. The soil on which I saw the trees planted was 

 not the best kind of soil for rubber, and as the plants were quite 

 young I could form no safe idea of the value of the system. 

 Recently Mr. TURNER being in Singapore told me that these trees 



