The resin is collected by making the labourers put on leather aprons, and then run up and down vigorously through the hempfields. The resin is then scraped off the leather, or off their skins if they prefer to do without leather. It is either eaten or smoked. Burton describes how at every cottage door in East Africa the Arabs may be seen smoking bhang with or without tobacco. "It produces a violent cough ending in a kind of scream after a few long puffs." In small doses haschisch (resin) has pleasant effects, for people experience pleasant illusions, good appetite, excitement, and laughter, followed, however, after an interval by stupor and sleep.
People addicted to the use of haschisch roll their eyes violently, and have a wild, startled appearance.
Naturally so dangerous a drug cannot be recommended unless under the most exceptional circumstances, but it is employed in cases of asthma and insomnia. Haschisch and opium are the two great curses of the Chinese, Malays, and the inhabitants of British India and the East. They may be compared to "drink" in this country, but they are important medicines.
Among the most curious and interesting facts in Nature is the extraordinary variety of the ways in which at present gutta-percha and india-rubber are employed. We should not be able to ride bicycles, or in motor-cars; we could not use Atlantic cables and many electrical apparatus; our railway carriages would be most uncomfortable; golf would be impossible; we should have no waterproof coats and no goloshes [sic], if it were not for these valuable and extraordinary substances, india-rubber or caoutchouc, and gutta-percha.
Their history is full of romance, but perhaps the most striking part of it is just this fact. Because a few (only a very few) plants found it necessary to protect their wood from burrowing beetles by a specially poisonous and elastic substance, therefore we can play golf and enjoy free-wheel bicycles.
The rubber is derived from the resinous latex or milky juice, which pours out from any wound in the bark of certain trees and creeping plants. This milk must be poisonous enough to kill the rash and intrusive mother beetle, who wishes to lay her eggs in the wood. It must be elastic, because the branches and stems swaying to and fro in the wind require a yielding, springy substance, but resin is contained in it, so that it promptly hardens and closes up the scar. The traveller Belt, in his Naturalist in Nicaragua, mentions that those trees which had been entirely drained of their rubber by the Indian gatherers were riddled by beetles, and in an unhealthy, dying condition.
Almost all the important rubber plants are found in wet, unhealthy, tropical forests; they are by far the most important jungle product in West Africa, as well as on the Congo River and in the Amazon valley.
It is quite impossible to describe the various rubber trees, and the different methods of gathering rubber, but it may be interesting to quote from an account of the method of its collection in Nicaragua, by Mr. Rowland W. Cater.[135]
The best season for tapping the trees of Castilloa elastica is from August to February. It is best also to perform the operation early in the morning before the daily rain, "or in the evening after the rain has fallen. The milk ... is white and of the consistency of cream. The tree thrives best in moist but not marshy forests.
"It seeds in the tenth year, and ought not to be tapped before its eighth year, or its growth may be much retarded.