and Magazine of the Ceylon Agricultural Society.— July, 1910, 93 



of the development of the rubber industry in 

 Ceylon, as given by Mr Willis, gives the whole 

 history of the rise of the industry in the East; 

 which is far from being the case. 

 Practically Nothing was Done in Ceylon 

 to push the industry or to experiment with the 

 Para rubber trees 



from 1888 TO 1897. 

 Even the stock of trees at the Gardens seems 

 to have been hardly increased. Meanwhile, at 

 Singapore, as far as was possible, everything 

 had been got ready for the development of the 

 future industry. A large number, about 1,400 

 trees, had been planted to supply the stock of 

 seed, a good many dispersed to various parts of 

 the Peninsula, to District Officers and planters. 

 Experiments in tapping in various forms had 

 been made, wound-response had been re-dis- 

 covered, block and biscuit rubber had been made, 

 specimens exhibited at exhibitions, distri- 

 buted to various persons and institutions inter- 

 ested in planting, and sent to rubber dealers 

 who had valued it at the top price of the market 

 (1896), while a number of experiments in growth 

 and flow of latex had been tried. There is still 

 in the Botanic Gardens museum a biscuit dated 

 1890. It was coagulated without acid and is now 

 quite hard and stiff, though still light in colour, 

 • a pale yellowish white. The specimens dated 

 1893 and 1894 are black and are now showing signs 

 of deterioration, but still fairly sound and elastic. 



It will thus be seen that as a matter of history 

 the Botanic Gardens of Singapore were just 

 about ten years ahead of Ceylon when Mr 

 Parkin first conceived the plan of making re- 

 spectable looking rubber instead of the messy 

 stuff only known there till 1899. There is 

 nothing whatever to show, however, that good 

 saleable samples of rubber were made in Ceylon 

 as early as 1899, either published or in the 

 correspondence with Ceylon Botanic Gardens 

 in our office. 



" Rubber will Never be a Big or Lasting 

 Industry." 



Though Mr Parkin was unable to visit the 

 Singapore Gardens, he obtained a good deal of 

 information as to our work by correspondence, 

 as he sent a long list of questions in 1899, on the 

 subject and asked me to perform certain experi- 

 ments for him. Mr Willis writes in answer, 

 April 15, 1890:— 



"Mr. Parkin wa3 so bu3y finishing off his experiments 

 so that he had no time to answer your kind letter about 

 rubber in Singapore before leaving for England and he 

 asked me to do so. We are very much obliged for the in- 

 formation." "Your trees yield much better than ours, 



though poorly compared with those at Para, and I am 

 inclined to think that Para rubber planting will never be 

 a big or lasting industry in the East." 



It must be remembered that rubber was at that 

 date very low in price and that we were all 

 tapping the trees very lightly and with much 

 caution not being sure that the plant would 

 stand the amount of cutting it gets nowadays. 



Since writing the above, a copy of the Tropical- 

 Agriculturist has come to hand, giving Mr. 

 Parkin's paper in Science Progress in full. He 

 modestly does not mention himself by name as 

 the discoverer of wound-response and the art 

 of making clean rubber, but gives the credit 

 of the "discovery" to Mr. Willis and his scien- 



tific assistant. As in Mr. Willis' various works 

 in the history of Para rubber industry no 

 allusion is made at all to the work of tho Singa- 

 pore Botanic Gardens. In Willis' 11 Agriculture 

 in the Tropics " the only allusion to the work 

 done in Singapore is : — 



"But little interest was taken in the trees for about 'iU 

 years (i.e. from about 1884) except by the heads of the 

 Botanical departments in Ceylon, Java and Singapore." 

 Now all that was done between 1888 and 1896 in 

 Ceylon was to tap a single tree once a year. In 

 Java nothing at all appears to have been done 

 as the trees in Buitenzorg were too small and 

 wretched to offer any prospect of their being 

 ever likely to be worth cultivating. About 1894 

 Dr. Treub and Mr Wigman, of the Botanic 

 Gardens, Buitenzorg, came to visit the Singa- 

 pore Gardens, and wished to see the rubber 

 trees. On the first sight of the younger ones 

 Dr. Treub turned to Mr Wigman and said : 

 " Wigman, did you ever see such trees." 

 " No." said Wigman, 44 nothing like them." 

 I was surprised ; but found that the Buiten- 

 zorg trees were, though as old, quite small 

 and not at all encouraging in appearance 

 Dr. Treub took the greatest interest in all 

 economic plants, but evidently up to that 

 date had not thought of Para rubber as being a 

 suitable cultivation for Java, and as far as I 

 can gather no experiments or records of obser- 

 vations were made in Java till after 1899. Mr 

 Willis does uot even mention Dr Trimen's work, 

 which deserves credit as he was the first, I 

 believe, to tap the rubber tree in the East, and 

 to record his results. 



Meanwhile, the Botanic Gardens, Singapore, 

 was at work from 1889, and was laying the foun- 

 dation of the industry and indeed had submitted 

 saleable rubber of first class quality to experts, 

 and had proved that the industry would pay 

 well before Mr Willis had ever seen a rubber 

 tree. Surely in an account of the rise of the 

 industry purporting to be a history of the Agri- 

 culture of the World, this work should nor have 

 been entirely ignored. It was known to most of 

 the planters of the East Indies and to many, 

 I am sure, in Ceylon. 



It would be too long to detail all the dis- 

 coveries and inventions made in the Straits 

 Settlements and F.M.S. connected with the 

 industry. They include most of the systems of 

 tapping (except the spiral, which proved a 

 failure) ; the crepe machines, the forms of 

 rubber known as biscuit, b'ock, crepe and sheet 

 the wound-response, actual returns of the tree 

 best method of packing seeds, and the pests 

 Fomes, Diplodia Hymenochoete, Termes Gestroi 

 etc., and methods of dealing with them. To 

 Ceylon we must credit the worm-machine 

 (invented after the crepe machine) spiral tap- 

 ping, the pricker and Biffeu's centrifugaliser 

 and the Northway knife. Honour to whom 

 honour is due : the Botanic Gardens of Ceylon 

 have produced valuable papers by Trimen, Bam- 

 ber, Petch, Green and others and Parkin's paper 

 — though anticipated — was!a useful piece of work. 



The following 



EXTRACTS FROM CORRESPONDENCE FROM SIR 

 WILLIAM THISELTON DYER 



will show to a small extent how far Singapore 

 had progressed in rubber research before Mr, 

 Parkin wrote his paper in 1899 • 



