26 AGRICULTURE IN THE TROPICS [PT. I 



bullocks in dry fields, buffaloes in wet ones. It performs its 

 work, however, with some degree of efficiency, and is both very 

 cheap and very easy to mend if anything should go wrong, two 

 points which appeal with very great force to the ordinary 

 tropical villager, with little or no money, and far from any 

 skilled help. It does not however cultivate deeply, but only to 

 a depth of 3 8 inches, and does not turn the soil over. 



Cultivators, in the American sense of the word, i.e. machines 

 with a number of teeth to tear up the soil, and drawn along by 

 hand or by horses or bullocks, are as yet but little employed, 

 being too complex, too expensive, and too difficult to mend for 

 the ordinary villager to use them, and but little wanted yet on 

 the ordinary European estate, on account of the cheapness of 

 hand labour. Locally made cultivators, with the parts of wood 

 tied together with string, are, however, in use in parts of 

 Madras and elsewhere in India, as also are locally made seed- 

 drills and other tools. The harrow is commonly replaced by a 

 log of wood with or without a horizontal metal blade in front 

 of it, drawn across the field, and increased in weight by the 

 driver standing upon it. 



The pickaxe is commonly used for digging holes, removing 

 stone, and for similar purposes. The rake is also not uncommonly 

 used, in the same way as in Europe. A very useful tool, 

 especially in the West Indies, is the cutlass, with which weeds 

 are cut down, trees pruned or lopped, and even holes dug. 

 Grain is usually cut with the sickle, and in fact all tools are 

 both simple and primitive. 



Manuring is in general just as necessary in the tropics as 

 in the temperate zones, if good results are to be obtained for 

 any length of time on the same ground, and it is the saving of 

 the cost and trouble of manuring which is one of the most 

 attractive features to the ordinary unthinking villager in the 

 practice of chena, described in Chapter I. Both European 

 planters and natives alike prefer to get new forest land to plant 

 upon, for it is so much richer in plant food, but of course such 

 land becomes every year more and more scarce, and in general 

 it may be said that every tropical cultivation requires manure. 



