39Q 



THE TROPICAL AGRICULTURIST. 



[November r, 1882. 



out of a population of 35,000,000, was something over 

 15.500.000, of whicli over 7,000,000 were women. The 

 wages of an able-bodied farm-hand are about £7 per annum, 

 with board, and £10 without board, female labour being 

 much cheaper. To perform work in a house, or on a 

 farm, stout healthy women are engaged at from 35s. to 

 40s. a 5'ear, witl\ food, and from £5 to £6 without food. 

 The number of hours of labour will not average more 

 than nine, and in many cases does not exceed eight. The 

 Japanese farmer is an easy taskmaster, and treats his 

 farm labourers with great kindness. In ordinai*y farming 

 there is little skilled labour, but in tea, silk, and sugar 

 cultivation and preparation skill and experience are require<l, 

 and paid for with higher wages. A good tea-firer on a 

 tea plantation, or a silk winder, receives double tlie wages 

 of the unskilled labourer. The food , of a farm labourer 

 is almost entirely vegetable, and consists of rice, barley 

 or wheat, millet, beans, pease, turnips, potatoes, onions, 

 ca:\jts, and a few other vegetable products. In some 

 districts rice is too high in price, and only barley, turnips, 

 and iiiii.ot are u>ed. iieligion, custom, popular prrjudice, 

 and force forbid the use of animal food. The clothing 

 of the farm labourer in summer is little more than a 

 thin covering for the body, in winter an addition is made 

 of one or two cotton garments, with straw sandals or 

 wooden clogs. The entire clothing for the year does not 

 cost more than 16s. or I7s. Several holidays are allowed 

 each year, such as religious festivals and family celebrations. 

 When a man and his wife work for J'early wages they 

 will rec ive, without board, about £15. From this they 

 have to pay from 30s. 40r. for a. small-roomed house, 

 consisting of two or three rooms, and buy clothing for 

 a family of four or five. A small garden is generally 

 attached to the house, from which one-half of the living- 

 is produced, and it is no uncommon sight to see a child 

 of six or seven years, with a baby of six months strapped 

 on its back, gathering brush or dried grass on the commons 

 for fuel. The homes of the rice, silk, and tea farmers 

 are the best of all the agricultural labourers in Japan. 

 The house is often as large as thirty or forty feet square, 

 always one storey high, with a thatched roof, strongly 

 built, with verandah in front, aud consisting of five or 

 six rooms, one being generally kept as a spare or recep- 

 tion-room. On the tea plantations, ordinary labour wages 

 are paid for the tillage of the soil, but the man who 

 trims the plant must be a skilled labourer, and receives 

 as much as Is. 6d. a day. The tea picking is done by 

 women and girls, and requires great care. "When working 

 by the day, they are paid from 5d. to 6d. Tea rollers 

 and firers must be skilled, and can command from 7d. 

 to lOd a 'lay. Silk production also gives very consider- 

 able employment to fai'm labourers, and as better pro- 

 cesses of prepriring silk are continually being introduced, 

 and, conseijueutly. a better article is produced, there is 

 a greater den);tnd for skilled labour, and increased wages 

 are offered. j\Iulberry plantations are found in fifty of 

 the sixty-six provinces of Japan, and the business of 

 silk production is carried on in the house where the 

 farmer resi-iis. The mulbercy leaves are either picked 

 off by women and children and carried into the house, 

 or the young branches, with the leaves on, are cut off 

 and taken there, where the leaves are picked oft", washed, 

 cut up. and given to the worms. When the cocoons are 

 ready for winding, that is also done by women and girls. 

 To make an even thread requires experience, care, and 

 skill, and such labour commands wages accordingly. Spin- 

 ning, warping, dyeing, and weaving are all, more or less, 

 skilled branches, and require skilled labour. The man 

 who tends the trees commands ordinary farm wages, 

 while the leaf pickers, ^vinders, spinners, and weavers of 

 plain cloth will get as much as lOd. to Is. Sd. a day. 

 Weavers of fancy-patterned goods are paid at a much 

 higher rate, recei\'ing as much as 4s., but this is very ex- 

 ceptional. On the cotton plantations the labour employed 

 is not skilled, and is paid for at a very low rate. It 

 was estimated, in 1875, that the total extent of land in 

 Japan under cultivation was about 12,000,000 acres, giving 

 to the actual farming population three-quarters of an acre 

 per head. The tillage is of the most thorough order. 

 Two crops are invariably raised each year, so that the 

 producing capacity of the area cultivated is double that 

 oi the number of acres nnmed. — Jom-nul of the Society 

 of Art ^. 



PROPAGATION BY BUDDING. 



Asa school-master is obliged to begin each year with a prim- 

 ary class, so in a journal like ours, it is necessary to now and 

 then repeat certain rudimentary lessons. There are many — 

 probably the majority— of our readers who look to the Amen- 

 can Agricvfturist as the sole source of their information 



Fig. 1. — A BUDDING KNIKE. 



in all that relates to agriculture and horticulture. AVheu 

 these ask us to tell them how to layer plants, 

 how to prune, how to graft and to bud. and to do 

 other operations, they will not be satisfied if we 

 refer them to certain books for their information. 



GRAFTING AND BUDDING 



have the same end in \new, and the operations are 

 essentially the same, but differ gre itly both in the manner 

 and the time of performing them. In both, budding and 

 grafting, we place a variety that we know and wish to 

 increase, upon a tree of the variety of wliich we know 

 nothing. It is a well known fact that our esteemed 

 varieties of fruit are in an unnatural condition ; so that 

 when we plant the seeds of these, there is no certainty 

 that the trees thus produced will bear fruit like the 

 parent tree— that from which the seed was taken. The 

 seedlings of our cultivated fruits may produce better kinds 

 than those from wliich the seed was taken, but generally 

 the fruit \vill be poorer, and there is no certainty about 

 it. It is on account of this uncertainty that we propagate 

 the varieties that we kuow, by grafting or budiling them 

 upon seedlings about which we know nothing. In grafting, 

 we use a scion, a twig upon which are several buds, of a known 

 variety, and insert it upon a tree raised from seed. AVe 

 plant this scion, or cutting, not in the soil, where it m.ay take 

 root, but upon a tree which aheady has roots. In budtliug, 

 we plant a sinffle hud upon another tree. The operation of 



BUDDING IS SOMETIMES CALLED INOCULATING, 



and the use of this terra, '* inoculating," has given rise to an 

 incorrect popular notion. In the inoculating of animals, in- 

 cluding the human subject, we introduce a virus, or disease, 

 which affects the whole system, 

 aud causes certain changes to 

 take place within it. j\Iany 

 have on idea that in " inoculat- 

 ing" a plant, a similar in- 

 tiuenco is exerted, and that 

 the nature of the plant is 

 somehow .so changed by the 

 operation, that it will after- 

 wards bear good fruit. This view 

 of "inoculation," or budding, 

 is entirely erroneous. Had (he 

 bud been left ou the tree 

 which bore it, it would have 

 expanded, and pushed from it 

 a green shoot, which in time 

 wou!d ripi^n and become a 

 branch, and ultimately bear 

 fruit. When we remove the 

 bud from its tree, and plant 

 it in another tree, it expands, 

 a shoot appears ; this grows 

 and branches, and the bud, in 

 time, becomes the tree, as all 

 the rest of the tree in which it was planted is cut away. 

 In budding, we need 



THE STOCK AND THE BUDS. 



The stock, or plant in which we insert the bud, is a 

 young tree of the same kind as the bud, or of a nearly 

 related kind. Poach, Plum, aud many other stocks are 

 young trees raised from seeds; other stocks, as the Quince 

 for budding the Pear, and those for the Dwarf or Paradise 

 Apple, are young trees produced by layering. In budding 

 the Peach, the stocks ;ire from seeds planted the spring 

 of the same year; the i>lants. with gond cultivation, will be 

 large enough to bud in Aigust or September. Apple stocks 

 and others grow for two or more years. But we must now 

 assume that one has his stocks ready; the next step is 



Pig. 2. 



Fig. 3. 



