Rubber has been known for the last four hundred years, but it is only within the last century, or little more, that it has been put to practical use. Civilization was for nearly three hundred years content with the historical fact of Pincon’s Indians of Brazil playing “ball” with crude lumps of rubber, and then it awoke to the fact that rubber could be used to erase pencil marks. In our boyhood Charles Macintosh had established its use as a protective from rain, but in our manhood the annual demand of Great Britain alone for rubber has grown to nearly 50,000 tons. We have lived through the sensation of a “Rubber Boom” which is only now commencing to exact its toll for the immeasurable folly of the thoughtless investing public. The native use of rubber in West Africa as also among the Brazilian Indians, was first as an aid to merrymaking, in the form of heads of drum-sticks, and in that capacity evoked harmonious chords from the goat-skins tightly stretched over the hollowed forest log. How little these early Africans dreamed that this simple aid to the charms of music would one day deluge their Continent in human blood! There are to-day very few colonies in West Africa without rubber forests which nature—prodigal here as everywhere with her economic gifts—planted generations ago. The discovery of the great West African rubber supplies dates back about thirty years, but it is a remarkable fact that Stanley in his books on the Founding of the Congo Free State, laid very little stress upon the future of rubber in the Congo. In 1882 Sir Alfred Maloney urged Southern Nigeria to wake up to the possibilities of rubber, and in 1894 Sir Gilbert Carter, to whom our Nigeria colony owes so much, invited a party of Gold Coasters to explore the hinterland forests with the result that they discovered an abundance of what appeared to be rubber-bearing plants and trees. The native community then set about vigorously searching for rubber with the result that the “Ireh” tree was discovered, and specimens of its latex forwarded to Kew in 1895. Although it had been discovered in the Gold Coast colony ten years earlier the administration in Nigeria was apparently in ignorance of the fact. There is some evidence that King Leopold received the first intimation of the almost fabulous stores of rubber in the Congo forests between the years 1888 and 1890, and the alert mind of that astute monarch lost no time in formulating plans for its exploitation in the Congo Free State, and what is less generally recognized in the French Congo also.