taking a proportion of the produce of the cultivators on it. The 
European planters, however, are in a position to understand and 
profit by scientific improvements, and, though a conservative and 
slow body of men, are able to exert an influence in the districts 
and are an important medium for introducing new methods and 
improved practices. The cultivator is the dominant class, a body 
of men of immense number, who live on the land and seldom move 
about, who have an extremely limited education, who have 
inherited a singularly perfect system of agriculture in most cases, 
and who are an extremely difficult class to reach or to move in any 
practical manner. With them is the far smaller body of zemindars 
or landowners, who really farm on a larger scale or administer 
large areas, and who are a wealthy and well-educated class. Even 
to them, the improvements of science appeal only slowly, and then 
only when placed before them in an extremely practical and simple 
manner. Were there a body of men from their own community, 
trained in scientific agriculture, able to adapt it to the needs of 
the country and to the peculiar conditions of their agriculture, the 
benefits of scientific knowledge and its practical application might 
be put to them in a way they would appreciate and understand. 
They would in turn influence the immense cultivating class below 
them, the vast class of men cultivating only from a half to ten 
acres of land each, or belonging to the villages which each cultivate 
communally a few hundred acres and whose experience is bounded 
by the limits of that one village and the dozens like it that surround 
it. It is for such men that an endeavour has to be made to devise 
improvements, and it is to such men that the results of these 
endeavours will have to be brought home, in the hope that the 
prosperity of the country may increase and the yield of the land be 
enhanced. i 
Naturally the resources of such a community are not very large 
and no appliance but the simplest is available. To the practical 
entomologist from Europe, accustomed to spraying machinery, 
insecticides and mechanical appliances, the resources of these 
villages appear very small. Nearly all their possessions are made 
of wood, bamboo, or pottery. Brassware is locally made, and 
simple iron appliances. But nothing else is available; machine- 
woven cloth and kerosene oil have penetrated to all the villages; 
iron cane-mills and improved ploughs to some; but to think of 
insecticides and of spraying in connection with these villages is 
ridiculous. For a certain class of pests, light-traps have been found 
