XXXII 
THE BEGINNING OF RUBBER 
I SN'T IT ODD that, when the automobile came along 
and needed a huge supply of rubber for tires, the rub¬ 
ber was ready and waiting! 
There is a natural history romance in the way this 
came to be possible. There is romance enough, to be sure, 
in the mere fact that the automobiles of the world roll 
around on tires that are made of the juice of a tree. 
There is romance in the manner in which many natives 
of the tropics build up strange milk routes for themselves 
in the dense and solitary forests. They cut trails from 
rubber tree to rubber tree. Every day they visit each 
tree on this trail and wound it. From each wound rubber 
milk flows. From all the milk that could be thus col¬ 
lected, thirty thousand tons of rubber a year was made. 
Nobody knew that there was to be a time when there 
would be automobiles that would run on rubber tires. 
Fifty years ago, however, a wise Englishman acted as 
though he knew. His name was Henry Wickham, and he 
had lived long in the Amazon Valley of South America 
and studied rubber. He came to the conclusion that 
rubber should be grown on plantations. He thought that 
it might be grown in India, which was ruled by the Brit¬ 
ish. He set about making this idea a reality. 
First Wickham convinced the English men of science 
who managed Kew Gardens, in London, that rubber 
should be grown in the East. Then he convinced the 
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