ards.

In their agricultural operations, all their fields on which any thing is
to be cultivated, whether high or low, are formed into such plots or
beds as may admit of retaining water over them when the cultivator
thinks proper. The lands are tilled by ploughs drawn by one cow or
buffalo; and when it is intended to sow rice, the soil is remarkably
well prepared and cleared from all weeds, after which it is moistened
into the state of a pulp, and smoothed by a frame drawn across, when the
rice is sown very thick, and covered over with water, only to the height
of two or three inches. When the seedling plants are six or eight inches
long, they are all pulled up, and transplanted in straight lines into
other fields, which are overflowed with water; and, when weeds grow up,
they destroy them by covering them up in the interstices between the
rows of rice, turning the mud over them with their hands. When they are
to sow wheat, barley, pulse, or other grain, they grub up the surface of
the ground superficially, earth, grass, and rook, and mixing this with
some straw, burn all together. This earth, being sifted fine, they mix
with the seed, which they sow in holes made in straight lines, so that
it grows in tufts or rows like the rice. The field is divided into
regular beds, well harrowed both before and after the seed is sown,
which makes them resemble gardens. The rice grounds are meliorated
merely by letting water into them; but for the other grains, where the
soil requires it, they use dung, night-soil, ashes, and the like. For
watering their fields, they use the machine mentioned by Martini in the
preface to his Atlas, being entirely constructed of wood, and the same
in principle with the chain-pump.

In order to procure salt, as all the shores are of mud instead of sand,
they pare off in summer the superficial part of this mud, which has been
overflowed by the sea-water, and lay it up in heaps, to be used in the
following manner: Having first dried it in the sun, and rubbed it into a
fine powder, they dig a pit, the bottom of which is covered with straw,
and from the bottom a hollow cane leads through the side of the pit to a
jar standing below the level of the bottom. They then fill the pit
almost full of the dried salt mud, and pour on sea-water till it stands
two or three inches above the top of the mud. This sea-water drains
through the mud, carrying the salt along with it from the mud as well as
its own, and runs