THE BEGINNING OF RUBBER 
Indian government. He was given money to carry on his 
experiment. 
He went again to South America. He found the spot 
where the best rubber trees grew. They grew seeds an 
inch long, three in a pod. When the seeds were ripe, 
these pods exploded, throwing the seeds as far as fifty 
feet. The trouble with these seeds was that they would 
not keep. They must be planted while they were fresh, 
or they would not grow. 
Wickham chartered a tramp steamer and rushed seeds 
to Kew Gardens. There they were grown until the 
plants were a year old. These plants were hurried to 
India and to the Malay States bordering the Indian 
Ocean. There, in botanic gardens, notably in Singapore, 
they grew to be splendid trees. 
Nobody would have paid any attention to them, how¬ 
ever, had not the coffee crop failed. The planters of this 
region had to have something to take the place of coffee 
in furnishing them a means of livelihood. They planted 
rubber trees. It is doubtful if these plantings would have 
paid if it had not happened that, about the time they 
came into bearing, the automobile appeared, to use all the 
rubber from their juice and beg for more. The planta¬ 
tions were enlarged, and the business grew. And so it 
happened that the rubber supply which makes the auto¬ 
mobile possible comes from the opposite side of the world 
from the natural home of the tree that supplies it. 
65 
