When these several articles of subsistence fail the Sumatran has recourse to those wild roots, herbs, and leaves of trees which the woods abundantly afford in every season without culture, and which the habitual simplicity of his diet teaches him to consider as no very extraordinary circumstance of hardship.  Hence it is that famines in this island or, more properly speaking, failures of crops of grain, are never 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 larger-grained rice is