1903 78 to 1.13 cents 1904 94 to 1.30 1905 1.18 to 1.35 1906 1.22 to 1.37 1907 82 to 1.21 1908 67 to 1.24 1909 1.20 to 2.15 1910 1.50 to 3.00 1911 93 to 1.75 1912 93 to 1.30 1913 59 to 1.10 1914 49 to 1.15 1915 75 to 1.00 While the feverish drama of the Amazon was going through scenes typical of a gold-mining rush, the curtain was slowly rising upon another rubber scenario away over on the islands and peninsulas of Malaysia. Its movement passed almost unnoticed and unheeded by the very people who had most cause to watch it with alarm. In 1871 an Englishman named Henry Alexander Wickham sailed from Trinidad up the Orinoco river, there studied latex-yielding trees and eventually made his way to the Amazon through the interior forests by way of the river Negro. His book of notes was published in London in 1872—_Rough Notes of a Journey Through the Wilderness_, with his own excellent drawings to illustrate his story of actual labour in the “ciringa” districts. In 1876 he was back again on the Amazon, with the _idée fixe_ of rubber so firmly in his head that, going up the Tapajoz from Santarem, he filled his cases with seventy thousand seeds of _hevea brasiliensis_ and carried them over to Kew Gardens in London. Here in carefully graduated hot houses the oval, mottled seeds were germinated, and in June of the same historic year Wickham was carrying his baby seedlings to Ceylon, believing that this island offered the climate most similar to that of the Amazon to be found under the British flag.