78 
be used. Of course, this system of tapping is not the last 
word in the tapping of Ceara trees, but in practice it has 
shown advantages over any of the other methods tried and 
is the best we have found so far; furthermore, the best re- 
turns, in the use of this method, were obtained in the series 
of experiments carried out by the Board of Agriculture and 
Forestry and the Experiment Station last year, and these 
were obtained by making two vertical cuts, two in each place 
and at each tapping. They were made with knives and a 
number of the cuts were too deep ; a number of the 
trees have been thus injured. The chief objection to 
it in my mind is that it does not admit of a suffi- 
cient number of tappings in each year. If we can discover 
some other method of getting at the same result, I think we- 
will find it better, provided we can secure sufficient labor. 
"When the vertical cut is made, there is a tendency in the 
bark to crack open — that is, the wood part of the bark cracks 
open, and this is apt to cause an injury that is difficult to heal, 
and it makes the bark rust. Aside from that, I have not seen 
any reason to believe that one will heal before the other. I 
have not seen any difference in that respect. We did try 
making vertical cuts on the tree, and found it more difficult 
to do the tapping in that way without injuring the tree. 
OTHER TEIED METHODS. 
''Other methods that have been tried with Ceara trees are : 
vertical cuts — paring, spiral cuts, V's, pricking and collecting, 
pricking and acetic acid, paring and pricking simultaneously. 
''The latex cells lie so near the cambium in these trees that 
it is difficult to cut with a knife deep enough to get all the 
latex without injuring the cambium. A knife with the right 
sort of guard will in a measure overcome this difficulty, but 
no satisfactory knife of this sort has yet been found. The- 
guard should be so constructed as to run in the bottom of the 
cut and not on the outside of the bark, as is the case v\ith 
the only locally made knife of this sort that has been pro- 
duced. Such a guard would not need to be adjustable, as it 
would always run in the bottom of the old cut, regulating the 
new cut to the same depth as the old one. Then, due care 
having been exercised in making the first cut, the others could 
be regulated by it. In the use of such a knife, by the time it 
reaches the bottom of the bark, you get the maximum amount 
of cut. I think that possibly this knife might be adjusted by 
altering the guard. The guard itself takes up one-sixteenth 
or one-twentieth of an inch. The Bawmo Northway paring 
knife has a guard on this principle, but is made for Hevea 
trees, where the bark is thicker and the parings thinner than- 
with us. 
