Balata and the Balata Industry. 195 
made these gutters are shallow and reach barely to 
the wood. They are about an inch wide outside, and 
transversly v shaped. The best collectors cut them 
with the neatness of finish of an expert tradesman. 
Usually, however, they are cut with very little care, and 
the wood is injured with every stroke of the cutlass. 
Some collectors follow the wasteful and destructive prac- 
tice of taking a band of bark i| to 2 inches wide out 
removing with it a portion of wood as well ; for as I 
have before mentioned, the bark and wood are adherent 
in a green state, and when the cutlass severs the latter 
on each side of the strip being cut, it seems to part from 
itself more readily than the bark does from it. Again, 
instead of carrying their channels from one to the other, 
as I have described is the practice of intelligent collec- 
tors,* they are made to cross each other thus : — 
* Both these systems are modifications of one plan which experiment 
must have suggested to the Balata collector as the best, but which 
appears to have been long practised in Guiana. Aublet relates that 
the Galibis and the Garipons of Cayenne begin by making a deep 
incision at the foot of the trunk, so as to penetrate to the wood ; soon 
they join with this horizontal notch others both perpendicular and 
oblique, reaching from the top of the trunk nearly to the roots. All 
these incisions conduct the milk} juice towards one point, where the 
vase of clay is placed, in which the caoutchouc is to be deposited. We 
saw the Indians of Carichana operate nearly in the same manner.— 
Humboldt's Personal Narrative, p. 358. 
AA 2 
