Gums, Resins, 



16 



When it comes to rooting up old habits, to come baek to simple methods 

 where complicated ones have always been used, there are plenty of difficulties 

 and resistances, and, above all, unbelievers and scorners. As a matter of fact this 

 routine method is represented by a powerful and prosperous industry, defended 

 by a class of engineers and others who live on it, and who will never yield except 

 to the evidence of an overpowering competition. It is there, in the camp of vested 

 interests, that the enemies of the forthcoming industrial revolution will be found. 

 . . . The manufacturer established his cost prices, and his selling prices in 

 proportion, but with ever-increasing profits, as the demand was generally superior 

 to the supply of rubber goods. Little he cared about where the rubber came 

 from or how it was obtained, so long as it came in plentifully and at a low price, 

 and thus it was that this professional man, who was the only person qualified to 

 guide the Indian in his preparation, in no way troubled himself about modifying 

 a raw material, which in the way he used it gave prosperity to his firm and a 

 dividend to his shareholders. It naturally followed that neither the manufacturer 

 nor his chemist ever troubled or suspected what rubber really was ; for the chemist, 

 working on the dried gum, found himself in the same position as a biologist 

 who would pretend to know the properties of human blood by studying a 

 dried clot. 



So it was that the two parts of the same industry, the production and the 

 employment, were worked apart, the persons employed in the one part ignoring 

 what happened in the other, and each one followed the routine which gave him 

 pecuniary satisfaction. 



Would the production of wine be reduced to an exact science as it is to-day 

 if the wine industry had been so negligent as not to know what grape juice was 

 before its fermentation ? But as concerns rubber, the equilibrium between supply 

 and demand has been disturbed, and a cry of alarm has been raised by the manu- 

 facturers themselves, who, under the influence of the incessant wants of an industry 

 marching with giant strides, and above all, influenced by the insatiable appetite 

 of that ogre for rubber — the automobile — finds itself on the eve of a famine of the 

 raw material. The most tangible result up to now of this disturbance of equili- 

 brium is that Para has risen from about 7 to 16 francs per kilo, and that it will 

 probably go up to 20 francs, during which time expeditions have been sent in every 

 direction where latex-bearing trees are likely to grow, to find out new sources 

 of production. 



Although these expeditions have been prepared by expert manufacturers, 

 no doubt masters of their profession, but absolutely incompetent in colonial matters, 

 and thus incapable to revise either the value or the work of these missions, the 

 latter are "doomed to sterility in advance, and have hitherto served but to engulf 

 capital. Even were these attempts well documented and carefully organised, 

 they would still lack for a long time the veritable base and element of success. 

 By this we mean the starting point of any similar mission, and that is colonial 

 experience acquired in a rubber country, which can only be obtained by years 

 of residence, and cannot be bought with gold. There is a big difference between 

 sending a Frenchman to gather apples in Normandy and sending him out to obtain 

 rubber in the virgin forests of the Amazon and Orinoco river basins. The moment 

 thus appears most propitious to bring forth from the laboratory the series of 

 discoveries, and of chemical and physiological observations, which the author had 

 so long guarded for himself and a few initiated ones in the speculative state of 

 simple scientific curiosity. Such is the purpose of the Syndicate for the Industrial 

 Utilisation of Hevea Latex— or rubber milk. 



