and Magazine of the Ceylon Agricultural Society. 



273 



with medical aid and hospitals which have been 

 built in all planting centres, the cooly is well 

 looked after. The health of the managers and ass- 

 istants did not showthe same improvement. Mal- 

 aria is in some cases constant, and the fact that 

 this is so makes the excellent condition of estates 

 and their labour forces the more creditable. The 

 period of rapid opening ot estates in order to 

 get a large area planted in the shortest possible 

 time has to some extent stopped, and this has 

 led to improvements in the working of estates 

 in many details. Every practical planter rea- 

 lises that for the future prosperity of his estate, 

 to obtain healthy conditions for master and 

 cooly is as necessary as to plant and tend care- 

 fully the rubber trees ; and moneys spent in 

 such sanitary measures are as profitably ex- 

 pended as in purely agricultural operations. 



Labour. 



There are about 80,000 coolies employed on 

 rubber estates in the Malay Peninsula, and of 

 these over 50,000 are Tamils, some 15,000 

 Chinese, 7,473 Javanese and 4,416 Malays being 

 employed. On estates where I have seen 

 Chinese employed in tapping there has been 

 every reason to b9 satisfied with the skill of 

 their work. The supply of Chinese is unlimited, 

 and if it is found that they can be used as 

 labour generally on rubber estates this will 

 relieve to a great extent any anxiety about 

 future demands for labour. The Immigration 

 Commission have now got into their stride, and 

 it is becoming generally recognised that such a 

 body, with a continuous and recognised policy, 

 will be of great use in the future. 



Estate Labour, Federated Malay 

 States, 1908. 



Negri 



Selangor. Perak. Sembilan Pahang. Total 



Tamils 29,103 13,635 3,443 334 43,515 



Javanese 1,662 2,276 1,023 38 4,999 



Malays 627 985 260 79 1,961 



Chinese 1,121 3,12 2.203 145 6,595 



Total 29,513 20,032 6,929 596 57,070 



Estate Labour, Malay Peninsula, 1908. 



Straits 



Federated Settlements 



Malay States, and Kedah. 

 Tamils 43,515 6,476 

 Javanese 4,999 1,336 

 Malays 1 ,961 1,724 

 Chinese 6,595 5,849 



Total 57,070 



15.385 



Johore. Total. 



1,418 51,409 



1,138 7,473 



731 4,416 



2,624 15,068 



5,911 78,366 



Prevention op Disease and Pests, 

 The Department of Agriculture has now a 

 staff of Scientific Officers who are investigating 

 the causes of disease and experimenting with 

 methods of prevention and cure. All efficient 

 measures for the preservation of health rest upon 

 exact knowledge of the causes of disease and the 

 effects they produce on their victims, and we 

 have now an immense number of instances of 

 accurate tracing by observation of the causes of 

 plant diseases. These have been accompanied 

 by experiment, and it needs no argument to 

 convince anyone in the least acquainted with 

 inductive science that experiment is as essential 

 an observation. During the past twenty years, 

 the discoveries in plant doctoring have made al- 

 most a revolution in agriculture, though this is 



seen more in Europe and America than in tro- 

 pical countries. The general laws of sanitation 

 for plants do not differ to any great extent from 

 those laid down for man and animals. They 

 consist in the removal and destruction by bur- 

 ning of all dead plants and dead parts of plants, 

 the prevention of conditions which favour 

 the progress of the disease, and the isola- 

 tion by means of trenches of plants whose 

 roots are diseased. These methods cannot be ad- 

 opted without an intelligent watching for the 

 appearence of disease. And the importance 

 of a stitch in time is in nothing more evident 

 than in the fight against plant diseases, 



A case was brought to my notice of an out- 

 break of a caterpillar which had taken some 

 time to entirely destroy all of leaves on the 

 "blukah" adjoining a rubber clearing, and only 

 when the caterpillars, which were in immense 

 numbers, had been driven to eat the rubber 

 was any action taken. The aid of the technical 

 experts of the Department of Agriculture 

 should be sought as soon as any pest is observed, 

 but the destruction of as many of the cater- 

 pillars, insects, larva, cocoonji, etc., which 

 can be found should be at once put in hand. 

 Every properly equipped estate should possess 

 the means of combating as early as possible all 

 diseases and pests, and should possess imple- 

 ments for pruning back the branches of big 

 trees. For this purpose haudy machines are 

 made at the cost of a few dollars which easily 

 cut at a height of thirty feet branches 

 three or four inches in circumference. Effi- 

 cient spraying machines should be found 

 always in working order in every estate 

 store, just as the fire apparatus in a gallery of 

 valuable pictures. The cost of even the most 

 expensive steam power spraying apparatus, 

 capable of reaching trees of eighty feet or more 

 in height, bears an infinitesimal proportion to 

 the value of the trees on even a small rubber 

 estate. The materials for spraying should also 

 be kept in stock, so that no delay is experienced 

 when such work has to be done. My experience 

 of over ten years' eastern planting has been that 

 the delay caused in getting weapons to fight 

 the disease has often caused the task of getting 

 rid of the pest to be much more difficult and 

 expensive than it would have been had the 

 estates been forearmed. 



Fifty years ago the conditions favourable to 

 the rapid spread of disease caused by insect, 

 fungi, or bacteria were not so great as at the 

 present day, and the presence of 35,000,000 trees 

 in an area of some 26,000 square miles is in itself 

 a danger; but the weapons which the planters 

 of that day possessed for an intelligent fight 

 against these organisms were of little use and 

 yielded without confidence. In India the loss 

 by wheat rust was some time ago estimated at 

 £91,000,000, and in Ceylon the leaf disease of 

 coffee caused the extinction of that industry a 

 loss of at least £15,000,000. The work done by 

 sanitation and preventive medicine in preserving 

 human life are now historical facts ; 200 years 

 ago the mortality of London was 80 per 1,000, it 

 is now about 20. Until a few years ago conta- 

 gious pleuro-pneumonia and foot-and-mouth dis- 

 ease caused immense losses of cattle, estimated 



35 



