OPIUM FACTORY AT PATNA. 231 
grower. This produce is made over to district collectors, who approx- 
imately fix the worth of the contents of each jar, and forward it to 
Patna, where rewards are given for the best samples, and the worst 
condemned without payment; but all is turned to some account in the 
reduction of the drug to a state fit for market. 
The poppy flowers in the end of January and beginning of February, 
and the capsules are sliced in February and March, with a little instru- 
ment like a saw, made of three serrated plates tied together. I send 
you one which Dr. Corbett kindly got for me, and a dry poppy-head, 
as incised: the produce is collected in jars. The cultivation is very 
carefully and well conducted, nor are there any very apparent means of 
improving this branch of commerce and revenue. During the N.W., 
or dry winds, the best opium is procured, the worst during the moist, 
or E. and N.E., when the drug attracts moisture and a watery bad 
solution of opium collects in cavities in the substance of the drug, and 
is called Passeewa, according to the quantity or absence of which the 
opium is generally prized. 
At the end of March the opium jars arrives at the todo by water 
and by land, and continue accumulating for some weeks. Every jar is 
labelled and stowed in a proper place, separately tested with extreme 
accuracy, and valued. ‘The contents of all are thrown into vast vats, 
occupying a very large building, from whence the mass is distributed, 
to be made up into balls for the markets. 
This operation is conducted in a long paved room, up and down 
Which the workers sit; every man is ticketted, and many overseers are 
stationed to see that the work is properly conducted. Each workman 
sits on a stool, with a double stage before him and a tray. On the 
top stage is a tin basin, containing opium sufficient for three balls, in 
the lower another basin, holding water. In the tray stands a brass 
hemispherical cup, in which the ball is worked. To the man's right 
hand is another tray, with two compartments, one containing thin pan- 
cakes of poppy petals, the other a cup-full of sticky opium-water, made 
from réfined opium. The man takes the brass cup, and places a pancake 
at the bottom, smears it with opium-water, and with many plies of 
the pancakes makes a coat for the opium. Of this he guesses at one- 
third of the mass before him, puts it inside the petals, and aggluti- 
nates many other coats over it. The balls are again weighed, and 
reduced or increased to a certain weight, if unequally made up. 
the day’s end, each man takes his work to a rack with numbered 
