203 



was sent to " call the rubber " two or three days beforehand. At this 

 date, twenty years since I commenced tapping the rubber trees I 

 cannot remember when I actually discovered the wound-response for 

 myself. 



Many planters and agriculturists, and Dr. Trimen himself, visited 

 the Gardens in these early days, and the advantages of rubber as a 

 crop was urged on them. They were shown the trees, system of 

 tapping and specimens, and the necessity of "calling the rubber" 

 before collecting in bulk was explained to them, and they often 

 carried awa}' with them samples of the prepared rubber. Many of 

 them came from Ceylon or had intimate relations v\^ith Ceylon. All 

 this was going on some years before Mr. Willis or Mr. Parkin came 

 to the East at all, or had seen a rubber tree. 



Mr. Wright, in talking of Mr. Willis' discovery of 

 " wound-response ", ( this word indeed seems to have been invented 

 by Mr. Parkin or Willis, but it does not occur in Parkin's first account 

 of his experiments) says that it is of great practical importance 

 in rubber cultivation, and also of great botanical interest. I fail 

 to see where the great practical importance comes in, at present ; we 

 knew of it all along, and the chief value of its knowledge was that 

 in early days a few ignorant people who attempted to tap a tree 

 one day, and did not find the rush of latex at first that they expected 

 thought, till they knew of it, their trees were useless. Should we, 

 however, find out the real meaning of it we might gain some 

 knowledge of the functions and physiology of latex which could not 

 fail to be of value, but at present we are not much wiser to-day on 

 this subject than we were in 1 890. 



Mr. Parkin's original paper, published in Ceylon circular 12-14 

 June, 1899, was one of considerable value, although many of the facts 

 were already known to those who had been studying rubber for some 

 years. 



Unfortunately, in those early days of Singapore, it was almost 

 impossible to get any agricultural research work published in any 

 reasonable time. We had to depend on the services of the Govern- 

 ment Printing Press, which was so full of work that papers took any 

 time from six to eighteen months to get printed, and we had, as 

 before remarked, too small a vote to spend a cent on printing from 

 our funds. 



Biscuits. 



Mr. Willis, in his Agriculture in the Tropics, gives so odd an 

 account of Mr. Parkin's invention of Biscuits that it is worth quoting : 

 " Not only did Mr. Parkin work out the wound-response and thus 

 change what appeared to be only a moderately remunerative industry 

 into a very profitable one, but he also worked out the way of coagulat- 

 ing rubber into "biscuits" the form in which the bulk of the cultivated 

 Para Rubber has hitherto appeared on the market, (for the sheets of 



