68 
The Editor of the Malay Mail, who quotes the article in the 
Standard, {suggests the founding of a college in Malaya for students 
of plant pathology as a memorial of our late King. This seems to us 
a little premature. It is useless to try to train students in plant 
pathology when we have no posts to offer them later. Further, it 
must be remembered that the knowledge of plant pathology and 
physiology in the Tropics is at present very scanty, except the 
Buitenzorg Gardens and the Pusa Agricultural Station recently 
started, there are no establishments at all in the East where such 
work is being or has been carried on. 
We have not yet in the Malay Peninsula the class of Eurasians 
and natives who would take up planting as a profession as they 
have in the far older Colony of Ceylon, or in India. This we may 
hope will come, but it is a matter of slow development of nations. 
We have no really settled peoples here ; the population is a fluctu- 
ating one, it comes to make as much money as it can in a short 
time and then away off Home to spend it. There are, however, signs 
of a more settled state of affairs in the Colony, where families have 
become settled into the country*, European, Eurasian and a few of the 
native races, and it is mainly from these that the students of the 
Medical School are drawn. The medical profession appeals more to 
such people than Agriculture for many reasons. In Agriculture at 
present all centres on rubber, and at the present day the rush ot 
planting and ease with which money is made or has been made 
induces the ordinary class of Agriculturist to plunge into the work 
with such little training as he can get in a few weeks on any estate. 
In the past the Malay Peninsula has not been an agricultural 
country, it mainly lived on tin and trade. There were cultivations o 
sugar, gambier, pepper, nutmeg, cloves, coffee and coconuts, and 
fruit and vegetables for local consumption, but many of these have 
gone down before the rush of the rubber tree. 
This latter has now opened the country to Agriculture, and is 
founding, we may hope, a race of agriculturists, but this will take 
many years yet. 
A great change in tropical agriculture is taking place at the 
present era. English governments have hitherto P ersi ^ e ^ ^ 
realising the importance to the Empire of the wealth of vegetable 
products she possessed in her tropical colonies, and their impo *■ 
to the ovorcrowded parts of the Empire, but the xesu „ ^ 
of neglect cannot be remedied in a year or two, ano much th 
was done wrong can never now be set right. However we are moving 
now, and it is quite possible that in a few years the claims of sc ence 
that is to say knowledge of the world and Us contents, will 
appreciated at their full value by the English people. E • 
