ACROSS UNKNOWN SOUTH AMERICA 
think, to the fair way in which labourers were treated. 
Mr. Davy told me that over an area of 13,261 acres a 
crop had been maintained which averaged 8% hundred¬ 
weight per acre. 
Experiments have also been made on the Dumont 
estate (at an elevation of 2,100 feet above the sea level), 
chiefly, I believe, to satisfy the wish of shareholders in 
London, in the cultivation of rubber, but it did not prove 
a success—as was, after all, to be expected. It is not 
easy to make the majority of people understand that 
coffee grows lustily in that particular part of the State of 
Sao Paulo mainly because of the eminently suitable qual¬ 
ity of the soil; but it does not at all follow that soil or 
climatic conditions which are good for coffee are suitable 
for rubber trees, or vice versa. In the case of the Dumont 
estate, although the best possible land was chosen and 
three different varieties of rubber — the Para, Ceara, and 
the Castilloa — were experimented with, it was soon dis¬ 
covered that only one kind—the Ceara — attained any 
growth at all, and this gave very little latex, owing un¬ 
doubtedly to the nature of the soil and the climate. The 
cost of extracting the latex was prohibitive. With wages 
at four shillings a day, a man could collect about one-third 
of a pound of latex a day. Rubber trees in that region 
could not be expected to produce more than one-fifth of 
a pound of rubber a year, so that the cost of collecting 
and shipping rubber from ten-year-old trees would 
amount to 8s. 3d. per pound, without counting the cost 
of planting and upkeep. 
By a special train on the Dumont Railway line, I 
travelled across beautiful country — all coffee plantations 
— the property of the Dumont Company and of Colonel 
Schmidt, the “ Coffee King,” whose magnificent estate 
lies along the railway. I regretted that I could not visit 
this great estate also, but I was most anxious to get on 
with my journey and get away as soon as possible from 
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