1 Nov., 1897.] QUEENSLAND AGRICULTURAL JOURNAL. 379. 
Treatment of Rubber.—It is intended that the rubber shall be collected 
and treated, under the care of a resident rubber expert, on the most approved 
scientific principles, so as to command the highest market price quoted for the 
best samples of raw rubber. Such rubber on the market is worth about 3s. Gd. 
per lb., and its superiority over other rubbers is due to the scientific methods 
employed in its collection ensuring freedom from dirt and impurities. It is 
anticipated that by the adoption of similar means in gathering the product of 
this company’s estates it will, instead of realising 1s. 8d. per 1b. net., find a 
ready sale at 2s. 6d. per lb. net. Hitherto there has been but a comparatively 
small outpay of India-rubber from Mexico, collected in a most primitive 
fashion; and although, in addition to the company’s plantations, wild rubber-trees 
grow in great numbers upon their lands, no organised efforts have been made 
to exploit the industry. No comparison, therefore, can be justified between 
the raw rubber, which this company proposes to put upon the market, and 
that of any other rubber which has ever come out of Mexico. 
DR. MORRIS ON THE ADVERSE SIDE. 
Dr. Morris says :—If, in a few years or so, rubber of the value of half-a- 
million could be raised in two little spots in Africa, I think the people who are 
advocating planting rubber all over the world should look more closely into 
the matter. We know that, in Brazil, the Amazon Valley and both sides of the 
Andes are largely devoted to the rubber industry. In Central America, 
Mexico, and other parts of the world rubber is likewise being produced as a 
forest product in large quantities. During the last twenty years the price, 
according to reliable statistics, has risen only a few pence per lb. Before we 
start planting rubber in our own colonies, and especially on land which can 
produce other things more valuable, we should be satisfied that the rubber 
industry is not likely to follow the cinchona industry, which has caused so 
much loss to planters in the West Indies, India, and Ceylon. ‘The tree which 
has been the means of yielding so much rubber in Lagos extends probably right 
across from Sierra Leone to the mouth of the Niger. The tree is not unlikely 
to be found in extensive tracts in the interior of West Africa. 
~ To which the Tropical Agriculturist replies :— 
We cannot help still thinking that, large as is the supply of the raw product 
from the forests of West Africa and South America, an extending demand 
will do more than take it all off, and that the cultivated article should meet 
with a remunerative market. But we are bound to show the argument on the 
other side, especially when stated by so good an authority as Dr. Morris. We 
therefore give a recent strong utterance of his on the subject, as well as other 
extracts referring to activity in Bolivia, Brazil, &c., and we ask our planting 
readers to give all that is stated, due consideration. here is just one remark 
we would make on Dr. Morris’s mention of cinchona—namely, that there is no 
risk of any planting community rushing into “ rubber” as the Ceylon planters 
did, twenty years ago, into “cinchona.”’ Rubber is not so readily grown, or 
at any rate not so soon and easily cropped as cinchona bark—a very material 
difference which must weigh with intending planters. On the other hand, 
rubber is a product which, if added to an existing tea or coffee or cacao 
plantation, gives very little trouble after being planted along roads, boundaries, 
or in fields by itself, till the cropping time arrives—so that the total 
expenditure upon it should be very moderate indeed. 
Evidently recent words of warning as to abundant supplies of rubber must 
have told on the British capitalist ; for a scheme which opened with a glowing 
prospectus of a “ British India-rubber and Exploration Company, Limited,’’ 
£200,000 capital, to acquire and develop 500 square miles of rubber-growing 
country, thirty-five miles north of Cape Coast Castle, has fallen to the ground. 
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