and Magazine of the Ceylon Agricultural Society.— August, 1911. 191 



Dr. Huber— remarked that he had gathered 

 from the conference that the superiority of the 

 wild Para was admitted, and that its uniformity 

 was due to the method of preparation. It 

 seemed to be the opinion of chemists aud manu- 

 facturers that the superiority of wild Para was not 

 in the composition of the latex, but iu the mode 

 of preparation and the uniformity of the product. 

 That was very important to the Brazilians. 



Mr. Sutbr — said there seemed to be consi- 

 derable variety of opinion as to whether there 

 was a superiority in hard Para over the planta- 

 tion rubber. Owing to the youth of most of the 

 plantations, there was an insufficient quantity 

 coming from particular estates; but this would 

 be overcome later. It seemed to him that one 

 manufacturer preferred one kind and others 

 preferred different kinds. The planter thought 

 it might prove a matter of fashion. Certainly 

 the manufacturers had given no reasons for the 

 changes they made, and the planter could not 

 tell what toaim at, and therefore simply pleased 

 himself in the matter, and suited his own con- 

 venience. It was a young industry, and things 

 would right themselves. 



The Chairman — said remarks had been fre- 

 quently made about manufacturers telling plan- 

 ters what kind of rubber they wanted, aud what 

 was wrong with the kinds they did not like. If 

 they did it would involve no end of trouble. 

 Manufacturers did not trouble themselves about 

 composition ; they did not care about the per- 

 centage of protein or resin in the rubber ; what 

 they did want was that what they got once they 

 should be able to get again They wanted uni- 

 formity. It occurred to him that they should 

 follow the example of the creameries, who 

 collected their milk from all sources, and 

 managed to produce a uniform article. 



Mr Petch (Ceylon) — said two points he bad 

 gathered from the Conference was that plan- 

 tation rubber was not as good as it used to be, 

 and that it was not sufficiently uniform. He 

 agreed that the former point was due to the 

 young trees being tapped now. It was undoubted 

 that rubber from old trees was better than from 

 young ones. He could not understand why the 

 rubber now cominglin was not of uniform quality, 

 asthe bulk was from trees of the same age. As 

 to the Chairman's suggestion that they should 

 bulk the latex like the creameries did their 

 milk, they had always been told that whatever 

 they did they must not mix their latex. The 

 planters would be willing to bulk it, if told to do 

 so, as it would save labour. 



Dr. Black — said he had satisfied himself, by 

 experiments, that the rubber from young trees 

 was absolutely inferior to that from old trees. 

 He did not agree with the chairman as to mix- 

 ing the latex. 



Mr Whalley — remarked on the different 

 meanings of the word 'unformity.' Uniformity 

 to a planter meant the uniformity of the product 

 of his estate and to a manufacturer uniformity 

 in the quality he desired. Yet again it meant 

 that there would not be a greater loss than 10 

 per cent in washing. There were 5,000 or more 

 manufacturers, and it was impossible to get 

 them to give a standard definition. 



On Wednesday, Mr Kelway B amber, of Ceylon 

 read a paper on the 



"UROWTH AND PRODUCTION OF PLANTATION 

 RUBBER," 



in the course of which he said there had baeu 

 no great change in the methods of planting 

 Hovea rubber since the previous exhibition, and 

 although a good deal had been said of late of 

 wider planting, the average number of trees per 

 acre might still be taken at about 150, obtained 

 by planting 12 by 24 or 15 by 20. Iu Ceylon this 

 did not appear to check development for the first 

 few years, and gave a more rapid protection of 

 the surface soil from the sun's rays and direct 

 rainfall. Wider planting, with from 40 to 48 

 trees per acre, would no doubt give, in time, 

 larger and more productive trees, capable of re- 

 newing bark freely ; but up to the present the 

 closer-planting method had been more remune- 

 rative, and for those countries now planting 

 Hevea it would still be the wiser policy to plant 

 at least 100 trees per acre. When rubber first 

 began to be planted on a large scale it was 

 usually estimated that no returns would be ob- 

 tained under five or six years, but it had been 

 found in many instances that the trees were of 

 sufficient girth to commence tapping in or after 

 the fourth year, and that with careful work no 

 harm resulted; but should the trees be over-tap- 

 ped at that age serious harm might follow. The 

 spiral form of tapping had now almost entirely 

 goneout,and latterly also the old system of prick- 

 ing and paring was disappearing, as it had been 

 found that better yields were obtained by paring 

 only, and with less injury to the trees. The 

 evidence was, however, not inclusive, and some 

 of the finest work had been done by the com- 

 bined tools, followed by excellent healing of 

 the bark. 



They might expect a gradual lengthening of 

 the period of bark renewal after each tapping, 

 but opinions were completely changing as to 

 the actual time required. In order to prevent 

 the interference with circulation which un- 

 doubtedly occurred under the ordinary system 

 of tapping, experiments had been conducted at 

 Peradeniya with a new incision method with, 

 so far, very satisfactory results. It consisted 

 iu cutting shallow vertical channels down the 

 bark from 6 ft. to the ground, incising these 

 at one foot intervals, and collecting the latex 

 at the base of the trees in the usual way. The 

 method had the objection of increasing the pro- 

 portion of scrap rubber, but if this was collec- 

 ted at once in buckets of water to protect it from 

 the air, and heated to 180 degrees before rolling, 

 the rubber was as good as that made direct into 

 freight, and if smoked could hardly be distin- 

 guished from it. Another point observed was 

 that with the rapid increase in girth of the 

 trees the width of the channels increased in 

 proportion. 



Mr Wickham— strongly condemned close 

 planting. He agreed with what Mr Bamber 

 had said as regards tapping, and was glad he 

 had come to view the excision method with 

 favour. Personally, he thought the present 

 method of coagulating with acid would have 

 to give way to coagulating by smoke. At pre- 

 sent they were curdling the latex and forming 

 rubber trees. The smoke method was that by 

 which the fine hard Para was produced, and it 

 was known that that was always of uniform 



