When the Para seedlings were ready to be transplanted into the open, India could not afford to adopt them. So the majority of them were sent to Ceylon, and small batches to Burma, Java, and Singapore. The West Indies, too, were given a few to experiment with, but the seeds had been obtained specially for the purpose of introducing Para rubber into the East, so naturally the seedlings were nearly all distributed throughout the Eastern Tropics. Most of the seedlings that went to Ceylon were planted in the Botanic Gardens at Heneratgoda, near Colombo, which were specially opened in the low-country region as an experimental centre of rubber cultivation. A few of them, however, were given a home in the island’s world-famous Gardens at Peradeniya, in the up-country neighbourhood of Kandy. The plants at Heneratgoda flowered for the first time in 1881, at the age of five; those at Peradeniya did not flower until 1884. [Illustration: (1) CEARA RUBBER TREE IN CEYLON. _Page 64_ (2) PARA RUBBER TREES, 27 MONTHS OLD, CEYLON. _Page 65_ _From photographs in the Ceylon Section of the Imperial Institute, by permission_] There are differences of opinion as to the career of the seedlings which went to Singapore. It is known that as early as 1880, some Hevea trees were in flower at Perak, a mid-region of the Malay Peninsula, and that in 1881 some of those in the Botanic Gardens at Singapore, in the south of the Peninsula, bore fruit. These trees may have been reared from Kew seedlings; or they may have been grown from cuttings of the young trees at Peradeniya, sent over to Singapore in 1877; or, again, they may have been transplanted one-year-olds from Ceylon. In any case, Heveas in the Malay Peninsula were yielding seed as early as their near relatives in Ceylon. And it is the seed supply of these two countries that has brought into existence the numerous and vast rubber plantations that now occupy a very large area of the Eastern Tropics.