Abstract
ABOUT ninety per cent of the rubber in the world is manufactured from the latex of the tropical tree Hevea Braziliensis, a native of the Amazon region of South America, but now cultivated on a plantation scale in Malaya, the Netherland Indies and Ceylon, which areas produce practically all the rubber of commerce. The story of how Sir Henry Wickham managed to secure seeds of this wild tree from Brazil in 1876, and its subsequent transfer, via Kew, to the Peredeniya Gardens in Ceylon, and thence to Malaya and the East Indies, is a fascinating one. Some of the original trees are still growing at Peredeniya. From these small beginnings, the vast plantations of the Far East have their inception. In Malaya alone the area under rubber amounted to more than three and a quarter million acres in 1937, and the exports to nearly 500,000 tons, valued at nearly 350 million Straits Settlement dollars.
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EVANS, G. The Rubber Research Institute of Malaya. Nature 147, 15–16 (1941). https://doi.org/10.1038/147015a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/147015a0