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manure is available. This, too, miglit be gathered by 

 comparing what was reckoned in the '' Ain Akbari" as a 

 full yield for several descriptions of crops in the Agra, 

 Muttra, Mynpooree, and Etawah districts (in regard 

 to whicli the Emperor's information must have been 

 accurate), with the known yield in these same localities 

 at the present time.* 



But it seems needless to dwell on arguments of this 

 nature, which are always liable to be directly traversed 

 by people who have no real knowledge of the question, 

 which from the complication of factors combining to 

 produce any crop, in any field, in any season, requires 

 not only a multitude of investigations, but their intel- 

 ligent manipulation by an expert to establish them 

 (and even then carry no conviction to the generality 

 of minds), when we can prove from the nature of 

 things that such must be the case. 



Owing to a variety of causes, some of which may 

 be touched on in the next section, agriculture in India 

 has become, and becomes daily, more and more what 

 Liebig happily designated a system of spoliation. 

 Deep as the purse may have been, and rich as much 

 of our soil unquestionably was, it is clear that a time 



* As the result of scores of careful personal experiments carried 

 out in the Allyghur, Mynpooree, and Etawah districts, the writer 

 would state fourteen bushels an acre of wheat to be a high average 

 for good fields, i.e. fields with which their cultivators are faii-ly 

 satisfied ; in other words, for the more successful fields, of the best 

 land, which alone is used for wheat. The " Ain Akbari" gives 

 nineteen bushels as an average yield in those days. I need not 

 say how far both these figures fall short of the yield of well-tilled 

 first-class lands, in East Norfolk for instance. 



