AGRICULTURAL BULLETIN 
OF THE 
STRAITS 
AND 
FEDERATED MALAY STATES. 
No. 4.] APRIL, 1910. [Vol. IX 
PROGRESS IN RUBBER CULTIVATION IN 1909. 
An excellent and interesting article on a Retrospect of 1909 by 
the Editor of the India Rubber Journal appears in that periodical 
on January io. It deals with the advance made in the manufactures 
trade, cultivation and knowledge of the industry, and gives many 
suggestions for future lines of work. Some of these latter are cer- 
tainly suitable for adoption, but here and there are few which 
perhaps are dubious. The intercropping of Para rubber with coffee, 
which he says is gaining favour in the Dutch East Indies in the place 
of green manures used weed killers which may assist in the spread 
of certain diseases common to them and Para rubber, does not seem 
to us commendable. We have already had it shown that coffee is 
liable to attacks of Corticium which readily passes from it to the 
Para rubber, (Bulletin VII p. 440,) and Irpex flava was a well known 
coffee pest in days of coffee cultivation and has certainly been known 
to attack Para rubber. It would appear advisable not to utilise 
a woody plant as an intercrop with a tree like Para rubber, but rather 
a herbaceous crop of some kind. There is less modification required 
for a fungus or insect pest accustomed to attack and live on a woody 
plant to adapt itself to attack another woody plant than for it to 
change its host from a herbaceous plant to a woody one. The num- 
ber of pests that have adopted the coffee bush as their prey is very 
large, and a certain proportion of these could more easily adopt the 
Para rubber, than could any of the parasites of any herbaceous plant. 
Corticium attacks a number of different plants, it is true, but we do not 
remember to have seen it on a strictly herbaceous plant. There was 
a rumour that Fames had been found attacking Ceylon Crotalaria , 
but the Ceylon crotalaria developes a stout woody stem often thicker 
\ts than a two years old Para rubber tree. One would suggest that the 
wild local form of crotalaria, which is hardly at all shrubby, would be 
