408 
Total net profit per ton, $39.36— that is 5.4 acres awes 
$39.36 profit — i.e., $7 per acre. 
Synthetic Rubber. 
Reports of rubber substitutes and synthetic rubber 
during 1908, as in previous years, continued to alarm great- 
ly and frighten many faint-hearted believers in rubber cul- 
tivation; but the end of the year brought us no nearer the 
production of a substance which will take tire place of 
rubber at a cost less than the preseut market price. Ru- 
mours of rubber to be made from peat, resin-bearing - woods, 
wheat and other substances are current periodically, but 
each case, causing great alarm at the time, in a few months 
is forgotten, and the fears of the timid investor in rubber 
planting are calmed until a new paragraph on the daily 
paper suggests to him that at last the* much-dreaded catas- 
trophe has come. Those who can best judge of the pro- 
babilities of rubber being manufactured synthetically at 
such a price as to make it a commercial success — chemists 
and physicists— still consider it most improbable. The 
rubber planter continually finds his trees giving increased 
yields, and with the cost of production becoming less and 
less, the price at which it will pay to make synthetic rubber 
gradually sets below the horizon of profit. 
Health on Estates. 
The average health of coolies on estates has during 
1908 shown a marked improvement, and with medical aid 
and hospitals, which have been built in alj planting centres, 
the cooly is well looked after. 
The health of the managers and assistants did not show 
the same improvement. Malaria is in some cases constant, 
and the fact that this is so makes the excellent condition of 
estates and their labour forces the more creditable. 
The period of rapid opening of estates in order to get 
a large area planted in the shortest possible time has to 
some extent stopped, and this has lead to improvements in 
the working of estates in many details. 
Every practical planter realises that for the future 
prosperity of his estate, to obtain healthy conditions for 
master and cooly is as necessary as to plant and tend care- 
fully the rubber trees, and monies spent in such sanitary 
measures are as profitably expended as in purely agri- 
cultural operations. 
