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to cultivate rubber in Africa and Madagascar, he was by no means 
prepared to see the rubber plantation in the Botanic Gardens, 
which astonished him. He stated that the damp low-lying ground, 
and the soil in which the trees were growing was exactly similar 
to that of the best Amazons districts, and that the trees in every 
way resembled those found there, both in kind, appearance and 
development for age. The herring-bone method of tapping which 
we had been adopting and which has been often described, he did 
not approve of, and declared that trees so cut would in the Amazons 
be speedily destroyed by insects attacking the exposed wood. At 
his suggestion and with his aid we tapped 150 trees in the Ama- 
zons method. This has often been described and figured and is 
briefly this. The collector cuts a single cut on each tree as high 
as he can reach with a small axe, the edge* of which is an inch or 
an inch and-a half long. Next day he cuts again 4 fingers’ breadth 
below and so on to the base of the tree, making one cut a day for 
every four inches of diameter of the tree, so that a tree 12 inches 
through would have three cuts a day. Small tins tapering to the 
bottom are pushed into the bark by their sharp edges below the 
sloping cut so that the latex is caught in them. The first day the 
latex is watery and scanty, and is generally neglected, but it 
increases in quantity each day, though it often does not flow really 
well for 6 or 8 days. The preliminary cuts are made with a view 
of “calling the latex”. It has often been shewn that in the her- 
ring-bone method, the flow of latex gradually increases as the 
wounds are again and again re-opened, the greatest flow usually 
occurring on the eighth day, and this phenomenon is doubtless 
due to the same cause as produces the increased flow in the latex 
cuts made in the Amazons method. 
At M. BONNECHAUX’s suggestion an iron axe (not steel) of the 
exact pattern used by the Seringueiros of the Amazons, -was made 
by a Chinaman in a few 7 hours at a cost of twenty-five cents, and 
failing anything else, small conical tins used for cake-moulds were 
used to catch the latex. These were not altogether satisfactory, 
as they were too large and too broad at the bottom, allowing the 
latex to coagulate too quickly. They were also not strong enough 
to be easily fixed by pushing the edge into the bark below the cut. 
However, they did pretty well till more suitable ones could be 
made. The tapping takes place in the early morning as soon as 
daylight appears, and the milk is collected when a sufficient num- 
ber of trees have been done, 150 to 250 in a morning, the collector 
stopping about 10 or 11 o’clock and going round again pours the 
milk into a specially made can, and takes it to the fire to be 
smoked. The trees are tapped thus for 180 days continuously and 
then allowed to rest for six months, and seem so little the worse 
that M. Bonnechaux declares he know's of trees which have been 
tapped thus for eighty years. 
The wounds seem to close up with surprising rapidity, espe- 
cially if the latex remaining in them is not removed, so that the 
risk of injury t > the tree from fungi or insect attacks is very slight. 
It might be thought that the amount procured from each tree 
