ever attended
with those dreadful consequences which more improved countries and more
provident nations experience.

CHAPTER 4.

AGRICULTURE.
RICE, ITS CULTIVATION, ETC.
PLANTATIONS OF COCONUT, BETEL-NUT, AND OTHER VEGETABLES FOR DOMESTIC USE.
DYE STUFFS.

AGRICULTURE.

From their domestic economy I am led to take a view of their labours in
the field, their plantations and the state of agriculture amongst them,
which an ingenious writer esteems the justest criterion of civilisation.

RICE.

The most important article of cultivation, not in Sumatra alone but
throughout the East, is rice. It is the grand material of food on which a
hundred millions of the inhabitants of the earth subsist, and although
chiefly confined by nature to the regions included between and bordering
on the tropics, its cultivation is probably more extensive than that of
wheat, which the Europeans are wont to consider as the universal staff of
life. In the continent of Asia, as you advance to the northward, you come
to the boundary where the plantations of rice disappear and the
wheatfields commence; the cold felt in that climate, owing in part to the
height of the land, being unfriendly to the production of the former
article.

Rice (Oryza sativa) whilst in the husk is called padi by the Malays (from
whose language the word seems to have found its way to the maritime parts
of the continent of India), bras when deprived of the husk, and nasi
after it has been boiled; besides which it assumes other names in its
various states of growth and preparation. This minuteness of distinction
applies also to some other articles of common use, and may be accounted
for upon this principle: that amongst people whose general objects of
attention are limited, those which do of necessity occupy them are liable
to be more the subject of thought and conversation than in more
enlightened countries where the ideas of men have an extensive range. The
kinds of rice also (whether technically of different species I cannot
pronounce) are very numerous, but divided in the first place into the two
comprehensive classes of padi ladang or upland, from its growing in high,
dry grounds, and padi sawah (vulgarly pronounced sawur or sour) or
lowland, from its being planted in marshes; each of which is said to
contain ten or fifteen varieties, distinct in shape, size, and colour of
the grain, modes of growth, and delicacy of flavour; it being observed
that in general the