68 



The Editor of the Malay Mail, who quotes the article in the 

 Standard, [suggests the founding of a college in Malaya for students 

 of plant pathology as a memorial of our late King. This seems to us 

 a little premature. It is useless to try to train students in plant 

 pathology when we have no posts to offer them later. Further, it 

 must be remembered that the knowledge of plant pathology and 

 physiology in the Tropics is at present very scanty, except the 

 Buitenzorg Gardens and the Pusa Agricultural Station recently 

 started, there are no establishxnents at all in the East where such 

 work is being or has been carried on. 



We have not yet in the Malay Peninsula the class of Eurasians- 

 and natives who would take up planting as a profession as they 

 have in the far oMer Colony of Ceylon, or in India. This we may 

 hope will com.e, but it is a matter of slow development of nations. 

 We have no really settled peoples here ; the population is a tiuctu- 

 ating one, it comes to make as much money as it can in a short 

 time and then away off Home to spend it. There are, however, signs 

 of a more settled state of affairs in the Colony, where families have 

 become settled into the country, European, Eurasian and a few of the 

 native races, and it is mainly from these that the students of the 

 Medical School are dravv^n. The medical profession appeals more to- 

 such people than Agriculture for many reasons. In Agriculture at 

 present all centres on rubber, and at the present day the rush of 

 planting and ease with v/hich money is made or has been made 

 induces the ordinary class of Agriculturist to plunge into the work 

 with such little training as he can get in a few weeks on any estate. 



In the past the Malay Peninsula has not been an agricultural 

 country, it mainl}^- lived on tin and trade. There w^ere cultivations of 

 sugar, gambler, pepper, nutmeg, cloves, coffee and coconuts, and 

 fruit and vegetables for local consumption, but many of these have 

 gone down before the rush of the rubber tree. 



This latter has now opened the country to Agriculture, and is 

 founding, we may hope, a race of agriculturists, but this will take 

 many years yet. 



A great change in tropical agriculture is taking place at the 

 present era. English governments hav^e hitherto persisted in not 

 realising the importance to the Empire of the wealth of vegetable 

 products she possessed in her tropical colonies, and their importance 

 to the ovorcrowded parts of the Empire, but the results of long years 

 of neglect cannot be remedied in a year or two, and much that 

 was done wrong can never now be set right. However we are moving 

 now, and it is quite possible that in a few years the claims of science, 

 that is to say knowledge of the world and its contents, will be 

 appreciated at their full value by the English people. — Ed. 



