THREE LATEX GATHERERS.
The boy in the middle of the group has the canvass bag over his shoulder in which he carries the scraps of dried rubber from the grooves on the trees.
The next day it is run several times through smooth steel rollers under dropping water, where it is flattened out into sheets of about an inch or less in thickness and of a proportionately greater area. It is next passed through roughened steel rollers that mark it off into ridges and depressions like a waffle.
These sheets, now tough and elastic, are hung in a closed chamber and smoked until they reach a proper shade of brown, when they are ready for shipment. The smoking process, which is to preserve the rubber, often takes many days, though at the time of our visit the manager of the Bukit Timar estate was experimenting with a method that would complete the smoking in a few hours.
The production of rubber in the Malay Peninsula is of rather recent date and it has increased by leaps and bounds. In the various "booms" that have taken place many fortunes have been made—as witnessed by the palatial residences about Singapore—but many have also been lost, though the witnesses to these are not so evident.
THE TRAVELER PALM, AN UNUSUAL TYPE OFTEN SEEN IN
THE FAR EAST SINGAPORE AND ELSEWHERE.
Whether the increased demands for rubber will justify the thousands of young trees that are still being planted, not only on the Malay Peninsula but on Borneo and other islands of the Far East, remains to be seen; but, judging from the opinions of several rubber experts of Singapore, this is quite doubtful.