PREFACE. 



THE present Handbook has been prepared mainly with the object of 

 furnishing to Indian officials and to students of Indian agriculture a 

 compact account of the alimentary value of the chief Food-Grains of 

 our Eastern Empire. A few notes on the cultivation of some of the 

 crops have been incorporated with the work, while an endeavour has been 

 made in two introductory chapters to show how a knowledge of the 

 composition of the several Food-Grains may be utilised in the fixing of 

 rations and the adjustment of dietaries. 



The materials upon which I have drawn in compiling this volume 

 were in great part gathered by Dr. J. Forbes Watson, who projected and, 

 in some measure, carried forward towards completion an exhaustive 

 treatise on Indian Foods. With that work in view, Dr. Forbes Watson 

 not only collected much scattered information from a number of books, 

 memoirs, and official documents, but caused many chemical analyses to 

 be made ; some of these were published in the "Journal of the Society 

 of Arts" so long ago as 1857. These analyses refer almost exclusively 

 to air-dried Food-Grains : they were performed with every care, and, in 

 some directions, were extended so far as to include quantitative determina- 

 tions of each of the ash-constituents of the products under examination. 

 I have not found it possible, in a concise Handbook such as the present, 

 to avail myself of all the data furnished by Dr. Forbes Watson's 

 collections ; but, on the other hand, I have supplied some missing facts 

 and figures by means of inquiries and researches of my own. In the 

 pages that follow the new analyses which I have myself made are 

 indicated by the letter (c) ; the rest are Dr. Forbes Watson's. In not a 

 few instances, however, the latter analyses have been controlled by fresh 



