174 



The Supplement to the Tropical Agriculturist 



Willis' " Agriculture in the Tropics," which we 

 do not intend to review here, only gives an ac- 

 count of Tropical Agriculture as seen in Ceylon. 

 Economic plants not cultivated or of importance 

 there are scrappily and often inaccurately de- 

 scribed (e.g. Sago Ipecacuanha.) It is apparently 

 not intended for a general work on Agriculture 

 in the tropical regions, and this is doubtless the 

 reason why the work with Para rubber done in 

 the Straits Settlements is entirely ignored. Un- 

 fortunately it is clear from the journals which 

 quote from it that the readers are under the im- 

 pression that the account 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 beeu re discovered, block and bis- 

 cuit rubber had been made, specimens exhibited 

 at exhibitions, distributed to various persons 

 and institutions interested 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. Those specimens dated 1893 and 1894 are 

 black and are now showing signs of deteriora- 

 tion, 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 res- 

 pectable 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 cor- 

 respondence with Ceylon Botanic Gardens in 

 our office. 



Though Mr. Parkin was unable to visit the 

 Singapore Gardens, he obtained a good deal of 

 information as to our work by correspondence, 



* So far back as 1883, Dr. Trimen was 

 anxious to see planters experiment with rub- 

 ber and to us, personally, he urged the publi- 

 cation of a " Rubber Planter's Manual" at 

 the Observer Press and gave help to the little 

 book then issued ; — later editions followed in 

 1888, 1890, 1900 ; and in some of his Annual Re- 

 ports Dr. Trimen advocated the cultivation. By 

 March 1898, 750 acres were planted in Ceylon by 

 planters, and by May 1901, there were 2,500 and 

 by middle of 1904 as much as 11,000 acres. The 

 Export from Ceylon rose from 2,79'2 lb, in 1898 to 

 41,798 lb. in 1908,— J. F. 



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

 the subject and asked me to perform certain 

 experiments for him. Mr. Willis writes in 

 answer, April 15, 1899: — "Mr. Parkin was so 

 busy finishing oft his experiments, that he 

 had no time to answer your kind letter about 

 rubber in Singapore before leaving for England 

 and he atked me to do so. We are very much 



obliged for the information Your trees 



yield much better than ours, though poorly com- 

 pared 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 "Tropi- 

 cal 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 sciontitic assis- 

 tant. As in Mr Willis' various works on the 

 history of Para rubber industry no allusion 

 is made at all to the work of the Singa- 

 pore Botanic Gardens. In Willis' "Agriculture 

 in the Tropics" the only allusion to the work 

 done in Singapore is : " But little interest was 

 taken in the trees for about 20 years (i.e. from 

 about 1884) except by the heat's of the Bota- 

 nical departments in Ceylon, Java and Singa- 

 pore." Now all that was done between 1888 and 

 1896 in Ceylon was to tap a single tree once a 

 year. In J ava 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 

 Singapore Gardens, and wished to see the rub- 

 ber 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, " nothing like them. ' I 

 was surprised but found that the Buitenzorg 

 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 -experi- 

 ments or records of observations were made in 

 Java till after 1899. Mr. Willis does not even 

 mention Dr. Triiuen'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, Che Botanic Gardens, Singapore, 

 was at work from 1889, and was laying the 

 foundation of the industry and indeed had sub- 

 mitted saleable rubber of first class quality to 

 experts, and had proved that the industry would 

 pay well before Mr. Willis had ever seen a rub- 

 ber tree. Surely in an account of the rise of the 

 industry purporting to bo a history of the Agri- 



* That was also the effect on our mind by his 

 personal remarks when we visited Buitenzorg 

 in September, 1908. —J .F. 



