AGRICULTURAL BULLETIN 



OF THE 



5TKAIT5 



AND 



PEDERATED MALAY STATE5. 



No. 4.] APRIfi, 1910. [Vol. IX 



PROGRESS IN RUBBER CULTIVATION IN 1909. 



An excellent and interesting article on a Retrospect of 1909 by 

 the Editor of the India Rubber Journal appears in that periodical 

 on January 10. It deals with the advance made in the manufactures 

 trade, cultivation and knowledge of the industry, and gives many 

 suggestions for future lines of work. Some of these latter are cer- 

 tainly suitable for adoption, but here and there are few which 

 perhaps are dubious. The intercropping of Para rubber with coffee, 

 which he says is gaining favour in the Dutch East Indies in the place 

 of green manures used weed killers which may assist in the spread 

 of certain diseases common to them and Para rubber, does not seem 

 to us commendable. We have already had it shown that coffee is 

 liable to attacks of Corticium which readily passes from it to the 

 Para rubber, (Bulletin VII p. 440,) and Irpex flava was a well known 

 coffee pest in days of coffee cultivation and has certainly been known 

 to attack Para rubber. It would appear advisable not to utilise 

 a woody plant as an intercrop with a trv^e like Para rubber, but rather 

 a herbaceous crop of some kind. There is less modification required 

 for a fungus or insect pest accustomed to attack and live on a woody 

 plant to adapt itself to attack another woody plant than for it to 

 change its host from a herbaceous plant to a woody one. The num- 

 ber of pests that have adopted the coffee bush as their prey is very 

 large, and a certain proportion of these could more easily adopt the 

 Para rubber, than could any of the para«:ites of any herbaceous plant. 

 Corticium attacks a number of different plants, it is true, but we do not 

 remember to have seen it on a strictly herbaceous plant. There was 

 a rumour that Fomes had been found attacking Ceylon Crotalaria^ 

 but the Ceylon crotalaria developes a stout woody stem often thicker 

 than a two years old Para rubber tree. One would suggest that the 

 wild local form of crotalaric, which is hardly at all shrubby, would be 



