The Hevea tree grows sixty feet tall, and when full grown is eight or ten feet around. It rises as straight as an elm, with high branching limbs and long, smooth oval leaves. Sprays of pale flowers blossom upon it in August, followed in a few months by pods containing three speckled seeds which look like smooth, slightly flattened nutmegs. When the seeds are ready to drop the outer covering of the pod bursts with a loud report, the seeds shooting in all directions. This is Nature's clever scheme to spread the Hevea family. The tree grows wild in the hot, damp forests of the Amazon valley and in other parts of South America that have a similar climate. The ideal climate for the rubber tree is one which is uniform all the year round, from eighty-nine to ninety-four degrees at noon, and riot lower than seventy degrees at night. The Amazon country has a rainy season which lasts half the year, though the other season is by no means a dry one, and so for half the time the jungles are flooded. These rubber storehouses had been growing for thousands of years in the Amazon jungle with their wealth securely sealed up in their bark, the peck of a bird, the boring of a beetle, or the scratch of a climbing animal being the only draft upon their treasure. The trees around the mouth of the river supplied whatever was needed for the little manufacturing that was at first done. But the discovery that made a universal use for rubber changed all this. Brazil was surprised to find what great treasure her forests contained. Large rubber areas were found a thousand miles up the river and she began in a serious way to develop a large crude rubber business. Less than twenty years ago Brazil produced practically all the rubber used in the world. But to-day she furnishes less than one-tenth of the world's supply. How Brazil, possessing in her vast forests millions of rubber trees of the finest quality, has been forced by unfavorable conditions to permit the Far East to sweep from her in this short time the crude rubber supremacy of the world is one of the most unusual chapters in modern industrial history. CHAPTER 4 WICKHAM'S IDEA The story of the success of the East Indies in wresting the crude rubber supremacy from Brazil, begins with an Englishman named Wickham, who might be called the father of plantation rubber. Wickham, who had spent some years in South America, understood the difficulties of gathering rubber in the jungles. He believed that if rubber could be cultivated it might prove a good crop on the coffee plantations in India which a blight had recently rendered valueless for coffee. What a strange fact it is that this blight gave Brazil a chance to go into coffee growing, and that while Brazil was losing the rubber supremacy to the Far East, the Far East at about the same time was surrendering the leadership in coffee to Brazil. The latter now holds first place in coffee growing as firmly as does the Far East in rubber growing.