The larger Funtumia trees are tapped in a very rough “herring-bone” manner and the latex caught either in leaves or in a calabash, and then transferred to a wooden receptacle for coagulation, but large numbers of trees have been bled to death through the almost incessant tapping to which they have been subjected. Funtumia more than any other variety requires carefully-regulated tapping, and it is well-nigh hopeless to expect the native collector in the hinterland regions to exercise that degree of care which the Funtumia tree demands as the price of giving forth a sustained output. The damage done to the bark alone in the rough and ready methods of extraction almost invariably renders the tree unfit for future tapping; the trees will live sometimes for a few years, but before long they perish. Dr. Chevalier, writing of the Ivory Coast, says: “Wherever exploitation has spread it has caused the adult Funtumia trees to disappear very rapidly. Some are cut level with the ground by the natives in order to extract their maximum yield, others, tapped too frequently, die standing, at last there remain only young Funtumia trees, under fifteen years of age.” This is true of the major part of the rubber-bearing regions of West Africa. [Sidenote: METHODS OF EXTRACTION] Several methods are followed in the extraction of the latex from the Landolphia. In every case that has come under our notice the vines were cut down with little thought for the future. Indeed in the upper regions of the Congo the natives sever the vine close to the ground and then tearing it from the trees to which it clings, they cut the vines into lengths of about eighteen inches and pile them into stacks so that from the severed ends the latex may bleed into forest leaves or gourds. Many of the tribes raise the stack of severed creepers upon forked sticks and kindle a slow fire beneath as they assert that the latex flows more freely and completely with the application of heat. The whole process is beyond question most wasteful, particularly where the natives not only sever the vine, but dig up the roots, compelling these also to yield up their stores of latex. To-day as the traveller marches through the rubber forests of the Congo basin he meets every few yards little heaps of decaying vine from which the rubber has been taken. Frequently too, one sees overhead a tangled mass of dead vine which has withered away through the main stem having been severed. The natives were either in too great a hurry, or else unable to climb for those spreading vines which would often measure some hundreds of yards.