th in idle hours. But at once they found that the
balls of Hayti were incomparably superior toys; they bounced better.
These high bouncing balls were made, so they learned, from a milky
fluid of the consistency of honey which the natives procured by tapping
certain trees and then cured over the smoke of palm nuts. A discovery
which improved the delights of ball games was noteworthy.

The old Spanish historian, Herrera, gravely transcribed in his pages
all that the governors of Hayti reported about the bouncing balls. Some
fifty years later another Spanish historian related that the natives
of the Amazon valley made shoes of this gum; and that Spanish soldiers
spread their cloaks with it to keep out the rain. Many years later
still, in 1736, a French astronomer, who was sent by his government to
Peru to measure an arc of the meridian, brought home samples of the gum
and reported that the natives make lights of it, "which burn without a
wick and are very bright," and "shoes of it which are waterproof,
and when smoked they have the appearance of leather. They also make
pear-shaped bottles on the necks of which they fasten wooden tubes.
Pressure on the bottle sends the liquid squirting out of the tube,
so they resemble syringes." Their name for the fluid, he added, was
"cachuchu"--caoutchouc, we now write it. Evidently the samples filled
no important need at the time, for we hear no more of the gum until
thirty-four years afterward. Then, so an English writer tells us, a use
was found for the gum--and a name. A stationer accidentally discovered
that it would erase pencil marks, And, as it came from the Indies and
rubbed, of course it was "India rubber."

About the year 1820 American merchantmen, plying between Brazil and
New England, sometimes carried rubber as ballast on the home voyage and
dumped it on the wharves at Boston. One of the shipmasters exhibited to
his friends a pair of native shoes fancifully gilded. Another, with more
foresight, brought home five hundred pairs, ungilded, and offered them
for sale. They were thick, clumsily shaped, and heavy, but they sold.
There was a demand for more. In a few years half a million pairs were
being imported annually. New England manufacturers bid against one
another along the wharves for the gum which had been used as ballast and
began to make rubber shoes.

European vessels had also carried rubber home; and experiments were
being made with it in France and Britain. A Frenc