Millet (randa jawa) is sown at the same time with the padi.  In the country of Manna, southward of Bencoolen, a progress in the art of cultivation is discovered, superior to what appears in almost any other part of the island; the Batta country perhaps alone excepted.  Here may be seen pieces of land in size from five to fifteen acres, regularly ploughed and harrowed.  The difference is thus accounted for.  It is the most populous district in that southern part, with the smallest extent of sea-coast.  The pepper plantations and ladangs together having in a great measure exhausted the old woods in the accessible parts of the country, and the inhabitants being therein deprived of a source of fertility which nature formerly supplied, they must either starve, remove to another district, or improve by cultivation the spot where they reside.  The first is contrary to the inherent principle that teaches man to preserve life by every possible means:  their attachment to their native soil, or rather their veneration for the sepulchres of their ancestors, is so strong that to remove would cost them a struggle almost equal to the pangs of death:  necessity therefore, the parent of art and industry, compels them to cultivate the earth.

RATE OF PRODUCE.

The produce of the grounds thus tilled is reckoned at thirty for one; from those in the ordinary mode about a hundred fold on the average, the ladangs yielding about eighty, and the sawahs a hundred and twenty.  Under favourable circumstances I am assured the rate of produce is sometimes so high as a hundred and forty fold.  The quantity sown by a family is usually from five to ten bamboo measures or gallons.  These returns are very extraordinary compared with those of our wheat-fields in Europe, which I believe seldom exceed fifteen, and are often under ten.  To what is this disproportion owing? to the difference of grain, as rice may be in its nature extremely prolific? to the more genial influence of a warmer climate? or to the earth’s losing by degrees her fecundity from an excessive cultivation?  Rather than to any of these causes I am inclined to attribute it to the different process followed in sowing.  In England the saving of labour and promoting of expedition are the chief objects, and in order to effect these the grain is almost universally scattered in the furrows; excepting where the drill has been introduced.  The Sumatrans, who do not calculate the value of their own labour or that of their domestics on such occasions, make holes in the ground, as has been described, and drop into each a few grains*; or, by a process still more tedious, raise the seed in beds and then plant it out.  Mr. Charles Miller, in a paper published in the Philosophical Transactions, has shown us the wonderful effects of successive transplantation.  How far it might be worth the English farmer’s while to bestow more labour in the business of sowing the grain, with the view of a proportionate increase