NINE-MONTHS-OLD RUBBER TREE NURSERY.
Chacamas Plantation, Department Palenque, State of Chiapas, Mexico.

ports of 1902 were about 60,000,000 pounds.
Rubber abounds also in the forests of
Peru, Ecuador and Colombia, the annual
yield of the countries outside of the Ama-
zon district being more than 7,000,000
pounds.

richest bearing. Probably $40,000,000 worth or more of the crude product was shipped from the Amazon ports in 1902. The city of Manaos, in the Amazon district, has 40.000 inhabitants, chiefly engaged in gathering rubber from the jungles and preparing it for the market. While some tracts of land have been exhausted, new areas of rubber lands have been discovered. The dependence of the future will be more and more upon the output of plantations. "The rubber product of the Amazon Valley is increasing with great rapidity," wrote a traveler thirty years ago. "That for 1870 was correctly estimated at 5.760 net tons, and once the lands of Bolivia are penetrated, this figure will be largely increased." The ex

The South American Indians are foolishly reckless in their methods of getting caucho.

"Destruction of rubber trees goes on with the utmost disregard for every interest involved. So far from attempting to save the trees, as a source of future rev enue, the native rubber gatherer resents every attempt to preserve this source of riches, and destroys the trees which give him his living. He prefers seeking new hunting grounds rather than using a little

care to save the trees he finds. The more prudent of them usually gashes one side only of a tree, then leaves it for a few months to in part recover. Then he again slashes it on the side opposite that where his first hackings were. This finishes that tree. The two series of cuts will completely girdle the trunk, in a dozen or less places, and of course kill it. In some countries, as Ecuador, the natives simply, and foolishly, cut down the rubber tree, and thus at once cut off all supplies from that source."

In Colombia there has been a gradual decrease of rubber production. The exports from 1871 to 1875, inclusive, amounted to 26,859.618 pounds, an average of 5,371,923 pounds a year. From 1876 to 1900, the yield has averaged 1,728,000 pounds a

year.

Similar conditions prevail in Assam, Madagascar, Acra, Lagos, Benguela, where the sole mode of obtaining rubber is by destroying the trees supplying the gum. In the Congo Free State, the destruction of rubber trees and vines is prohibited by law.

Rubber trees and vines flourish in Central America and in some parts of Mexico. The best known of the rubber-bearing trees is the hule or Castilloa elastica.

It

927

need no cultivation, and grow rapidly from the seed. Hitherto most people have been discouraged from planting rubber trees, owing principally to the length of time needed for the tree to become sufficiently large to produce a profitable yield of gum; but the few who have undertaken the investment can now look forward to a time not far distant when their few thousand rubber trees may bring them a fortune little dreamed of."

Senor Romero, lately ambassador from "Coffee and Rubber Culture in Mexico," Mexico, in his very full and elaborate work, says of the Castilloa: "The large profits

RUBBER TREE IN MEXICO.

It has a circumference of 26 inches at 2 years of age.

A tree will

grows to a large size and seems to be better suited to the soil and altitude than the Hevea braziliensis or Para. "For wet lands Para is undoubtedly superior to Castilloa," says E. L. Peritara in his able work on "Tropical America;" "therefore, it is thought that Hevea will thrive in the low lands of parts at least of Central America, and may perhaps give good results as far north as the region of Tehuantepec." Of hule trees John Crawford of Nic- give, at the end of a few years, six pounds aragua says in the U. S. Consular Re- of sap a year for every tree; that sap ports: "Some trees two to three feet would lose about one-half by evaporation. in diameter and thirty-five to fifty feet Then each tree would yield three pounds tall will give annually twenty to forty net of rubber, the minimum rate of propounds of good rubber. In collecting rub- duction, which will increase every sucber, if the trees have been properly ma- ceeding year to the extent of being three tured, from eight to twelve pounds can be or four times greater than the first." taken biennially; but after the tree is

Of late years a number of rubber

twelve years of age, a Sufficient quantity orchards have been planted in Central of sap or emulsion could be annually ex- America and Mexico, for the supply of tracted from each tree to yield from ten wild rubber will certainly fall short some to fifteen pounds of good, elastic rubber." day. In the United States the consumpRica says: "The trees are easily planted, having doubled the last seventeen years. The United States Consul in Costa tion of rubber goods is rapidly increasing,

According to the Mexican Herald, the United States buys $25,000,000 worth of crude rubber every year, and Great Britain consumes about as much. While Europe is behind these two countries in its appreciation of rubber goods, the demand is steadily growing. The future of rubberculture enterprises seems to be well assured, if properly managed.

depends upon the ground chosen for rub-
ber culture. He says: "One result of my
carly observation, and one that grew with
each day's experience, was the conviction
that a knowledge of climate, rainfall, soils,
drainage, etc., is an absolute necessity from
the beginning in the selection of suitable
sites for rubber plantations. In other
words, the expert tropical agriculturist,
well equipped with common sense, is most
likely to be the one who starts right. For
example, one plans to plant the Castilloa.
It is a soft wood tree, a tree that from its
physical formation is not built to stand
high winds, that with its long taproot must
have a deep, rich soil and well drained
withal. It is a deciduous tree, which
means that at a certain time each year it
encourages the presence of the sun's rays
on its trunk and limbs. The prospective
planter should, therefore, pick out land that
is covered with a growth of soft rather
than hard wood trees, as the latter points
to gravelly soil instead of clayey loam. It
should be soil that will give the tree plenty
of moisture during the dry season and yet
that will not be soggy during the wet. In
the clearing of the land, if there are not
natural windbreaks, a certain amount of
forest should be left standing to act as
such."

"A third of the crude rubber," says Cyrus C. Adams in "Text-Book of Commercia Geography," p. 112, "is made into shoes and boots. The United States manufactures six times as many rubber shoes and boots as the whole of Europe, for the reason that everybody in this country wears 'rubbers,' while their use in Europe is confined to persons of means. Many other articles are made of rubber, as bicycle tires, belting, blankets, combs, and buttons. The manufacturers are mainly confined to Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. Nearly all the output is consumed at home, and manufactured imports are very small."

In 1902 the imports of crude India rubber into the United States amounted to 50.413.481 pounds, valued at $24,899,230. From Brazil came 31,532,700 pounds; from Central America, Mexico, and the West Indies, 1.485.418 pounds. The New York prices of Para fine rubber ranged from 72 to 99 cents a pound in 1902.

In the February issue of The India Rubber World is a summary of rubber planting and exploitation in Mexico. The returns supplied by twenty-six companies show that 5.443.105 rubber trees have been planted during the six years, 1897-1902. Prominent among the plantations are the Orizaba, the Chacamas, and La Zacualpa, in the State of Chiapas. The latter has now growing over 1,000,000 rubber trees, and its grove of 5,000 trees planted in 1889 produced an average of three pounds per tree in 1901, their twelfth year. One acre of the Oaxica plantation, in Buena Vista, yielded 88 The great rubber-producing countries of pounds of rubber. In the Isthmus of the Old World are in East and West Tehuantepec, in the heart of the Rubber Belt, is the fertile tract known as the "Santa Isabel," which is being developed by American capital. Of these enter prises and others the India Rubber World (January 1, 1903) says: "Such planting of rubber as has been done in Mexico has been done by foreigners, using their own capital, and while most of the trees planted to date are too young to yield rubber, such trees as have become productive seem to have given such satisfactory results as to encourage more extensive planting."

The editor of The India Rubber World, who is now visiting plantations on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, writes that much

Africa, their annual output being 50,000.000 pounds or more. Rubber is the most valuable article of commerce in the Congo Free State, the rubber exports amounting to about $10,000,000 a year. The gum is inferior to the Para.

Other African countries in the "rubber belt" are Sierra Leone, Gold Coast, Nigeria, French Congo, Angola, etc.

Small quantities of rubber are produced in Madagascar, Cevlon, Singapore, Penang, and the Dutch East Indies. Rubberyielding trees grow in Assam but the supply of caoutchouc is so small that it cuts no figure in India's commerce.

EUGENE PARSONS.

The Russian Jew in the Pale.

BY

LOUIS E. VAN NORMAN.

RUSSIAN PEASANT TYPES.

tion of instruments of mortgage in the names of Jews and their registration as lessees of landed estates outside of towns and townlets," and, finally, forbade the Jews to keep open or carry on any business on Sundays and Christian holidays. These measures applied only to the Jews in the Pale, but a supplementary order compelled all Jews to return to this district. Encouraged by the clemency and even open permission of the Tzar Alexander II., they had spread out into many other sections of the empire, where, as "skilled artisans," they were prospering and contributing to the general welfare of the country. The law of 1882 compelled them to return to the Pale, and the terrible overcrowding began, the congestion which has made the problem of the Russian Jew so complex and spread the danger of disease and fanatical outrage all over the empire.

Like all poor, badly nourished, unhealthy classes, the Russian Jew is very prolific, and great misery does not prevent large families. His poverty and the general wretchedness of his life are almost beyond belief. The writer spent some time several years ago in Kamieniec, a town of Podolia, some seventy miles from KishiKamieniec is full of Jews, of the

son, Tchernigov, Ekaterinoslav, and Bessarabia. Kishinev, the scene of the recent massacres, is in the last-named "government," about one hundred miles to the northwest of Odessa. In taking over these provinces, which were not originally Russian, from Poland, Turkey, and Rumania (the greater part of Bessarabia came from Rumania by the treaty of 1878), Russia was confronted with the problem of what to do with a large Jewish population which had dwelt on the land for centuries, but which the absorbing empire was not willing to naturalize.

nev.

The "reconcentrado" policy of crowding the Jews into the cities and larger towns of the Pale began with the notorious "May Laws" of May, 1882, elaborated by General Ignatieff, a violent anti-Semite. As a "temporary arrangement," till a complete "revision of all the laws concerning the Jews" could be made, these laws forbade the Jews to settle outside the towns and "townlets," except in the cases of those Jewish colonies already existing and whose inhabitants were agricultural. The laws also "suspended temporarily" the "comple