Excerpt from Indiarubber and Gutta Percha: A Complete Practical Treatise on Indiarubber and Gutta Percha in Their Historical, Botanical, Arboricultural, Mechanical, Chemical, and Electrical Aspects If the reader will be good enough to take a rapid glance at the bibliographical resume at the end of this treatise, he will very readily acknowledge that the special literature devoted to indiarubber and gutta percha is considerable, not only in foreign countries, but also in our own, and that such is the case although only a comparatively short time has elapsed since the discovery of these raw materials and their industrial applications. If we to-day, therefore, undertake the responsibility of presenting to the public a new treatise, dealing with the same subject, it is not for the mere sake of the vainglory of adding another unit to the already considerable number of works and memoirs published, as many on "gum clastic" as on "gum plastic" We have a higher ambition, a less futile object. We acknowledge that almost all the treatises hitherto published have the great merit of having dealt excellently with the subject from the special point of view or vantage ground in which the authors were placed, but, taken as a whole, they are, nearly always, awanting in that cohesion and in that unity of purpose which the reader looks for in a work of this nature. They are deficient in that co-ordination which is so essential for those who seek to embrace, in a single glance of the eye, the results obtained, up to a certain moment, on any given subject. The greater number of treatises which, to our own knowledge, have been edited with this end in view, contain, most generally, obsolete information, and no longer respond to the wants of the present time. Like man, books get old quickly nowadays, and a book is scarcely written before it requires modification, nay even completion. Freely availing ourselves of the elements of an abundant special literature, and profiting by our own personal experience, we have been able to effect our purpose, to combine in one harmonious whole the precious scattered elements of an infinite number of publications, to extract from them their quintessence, and make of them an exact precis or resume responding to the needs of the present day. In this way we have been enabled to methodically classify in their turn or rotation the plants producing the raw material, the commercial varieties most commonly met with on the international market, with the characteristic signs of their individuality, and have also been enabled to assign to them a certain habitat in each part of the globe. Moreover, thanks to these elements, we have been enabled to deal competently with the rational culture and acclimatisation of indiarubber and gutta percha plants, and to devote ourselves to a critical study of the methods employed, not only for the collection of the latex, but also for the extraction therefrom of the respective rubbers and gutta perchas, and thus have been enabled to recommend the method which appeared to us the most advantageous for each species. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.