TEL" IE 



TROPICAL AGRICULTURIST 



AND 



MAGAZINE OF THE 



CEYLON AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



Vol. XXVII. COLOMBO, OCTOBER 15th, 1906. No. 4. 



The Ceylon Rubber Exhibition. 



Speaking generally, the Rubber Exhibition may be called an unqualified 

 success, and we have learnt many lessons from it, which should indirectly repay its 

 cost many times over. To take only a few of these, we may assume for example that 

 the days of the biscuits are numbered. This was the original form in which Mr. 

 Parkin made up his samples in the laboratory, and has survived in Ceylon, though 

 abandoned in Malaya. No one who saw the businesslike appearance of the Malayan 

 and other samples of block and sheet as compared with the amateur look of the 

 biscuits can doubt that the latter are doomed to disappearance. 



We have also learnt that the area available for rubber-planting is more 

 extended, both as to altitude and as to extension, than had hitherto been supposed, 

 and that there will soon be some danger of over-production, as planting is going on so 

 rapidly, not only in Ceylon and the Federated Malay States, but in other tropical 

 countries. 



As regards methods of preparation, there is evidently much yet to learn, and 

 experiments will at once be put in hand by the Botanical Department on several 

 lines suggested by the Exhibition. For instance, is it really the case, as the awards 

 of prizes would at first glance suggest, that high-grown rubber is better than that of 

 the low country, or is it that the prize winners have older trees or have adopted 

 more careful methods of preparation ? In one case at least, and that the best Para 

 rubber in the Exhibition, the rubber was coagulated with a chemical not hitherto 

 used, so far as we know, by any one else for the purpose. 



The tapping knives for Para rubber were very good, but for Castilloa, and 

 still more for Ceara, were but poor, little ingenuity being shown in adapting 

 them to the changed conditions. 



Another important question is "do we wash and dry our rubber too much?" 

 The Malayan rubbers were mostly more washed than those of Ceylon, and were on 

 the whole inferior to them in quality, and there was other evidence pointing the 

 same way. The South American rubbers exhibited are much stronger than any of 

 the plantation rubbers, and spring back when stretched to a much greater extent, 

 and they are practically unwashed, and, what few if any persons in Ceylon had 

 previously realised, are also undried and quite whitish and opaque. It is consequently 

 quite possible that our rubbers are too much dried. It was specially noticeable 



