Page 3 Advertisements Column 1

New Zealander, Volume 9, Issue 729, 9 April 1853, Page 3

Statistics and Uses of Gutta Perciia. —The majority of our readers knows perfectly well that the tree from which it is obtained, and there is but one, grows scarcely anywhere but in the Malayan Archipelego, and that until Dr. Montgomerie noticed the native use of it in 1842, and, together with Dr. D’ Almedia, forced it upon the attention of the London manufactures in 1843, it was unknown here. Jn 1845 we imported only 20,6001b5., but in 1848, the quantity brought in amounted to 3,000,0001b5., and since then it has been constantly increasing, and, if it can be bad, will continue to increase. Even now we see it in use in the shape of mill bands, buckets, sailors’ bats, buoys speaking-trumpets, tables, baskets, picture-frames, moulded decorations of nil sorts, pumps and bottles for acids, pipes for water and gas, soles for boots, hats, snuff-boxes, wl ips, skat'-b< ttoars, bottles, breasts (f of water wheels, dressings for ,wounds, sasb-cord, waterproof cloth, even toothed wheels, and a hundred other things. And those, we are satisfied,are as nothing compared with the uses to yvhich it will be applied hereafter’. In fact you may make any thing of it but bread and cheese, and even of these you could get such an imitation ns would serve the eye, though the gastric juice would find it difficult to work upon. The mode of obtaining gutta percha, we may say here, is most wasteful. Instead of tapping the trees at intervals' to obtain the sap, the trees are cut down, so that, unless their artificial cultivation be taken up by civilized people, the supply will soon be shortened. Dr. Oxley, who wrote in Singapore, whence all that we get at present comes, says, that for the quantity which w-as exported between January Ist, ’45 and July, 1847, nearly 70,000 treei must have been cut down, — The Builder.