ecxxxix 



'' (A) I found that there was a decided difference in the weight of 

 a crop according as it was cut at the commencement or end of the 

 harvest. The grain was drier and lighter at the end than at the 

 beginning; consequently the outturn of crops cut at the commence- 

 ment of the season was unduly overstated. What allowance to make 

 on this account I know not ; yet a difference of a couple of seers in 

 the produce of one-tenth of an acre comes to a serious amount on the 

 whole " 



In the Madras settlements the grain experiments were really very 

 few, considering the number of soils and of crops the outturn of which 

 had to be ascertained. To take the two districts in which the number 

 of experiments was the largest, viz., Nellore and Coimbatore. In 

 Nellore, the experiments were made during seven years. The number 

 was for jonna 2,771, for aruga 425 and for paddy 2,230, This amounts 

 to hardly one experiment for each sort of soil (and there are 66 of them) 

 in a year for each taluk which is oftentimes bigger than an English 

 county. In Coimbatore, 1,542 experiments were made as regards the 

 outturn of the three dry grains — cumbu, cholum and ragi — in five 

 taluks in two years. The number hardly amounts to one for each 

 grain for each sort of soil. 



The cultivation expenses are even more difficult to ascertain. The 

 cost of cultivation varies with agricultural skill and efficiency of 

 labour in different localities and with the characteristics of different 

 castes of laborers in the same locality. In some of the Madras settle- 

 ' ments the cultivation expenses were not ascertained for each variety 

 of soil ; it was ascertained with more or less accuracy for one sort of 

 soil and increased or decreased in proportion to the assumed outturn in 

 the case of other soils. This was particularly the case in Kurnool and 

 the same method has been proposed to be adopted in the case of 

 Tanjore. In his " Analysis ^' of the agricultural statistics of the 

 Kurnool district, Mr. Benson points out the fallaciousness of this 

 method. He remarks that '' the system of calculating the working 

 expenses of the ryot by which these decrease in proportion to the 

 assessed value of the land is radically wrong,'^ and that " in fact, 

 within certain limits the expenses for the production of the standard 

 crop of jonna vary rather inversely to the quality of the land dealt 

 with.'^ 



The quotations of prices of food grains for the old years on the aver- 

 age of which the commutation rates are based cannot also be relied 

 upon as accurate. These prices are given in terms of garce (a mea- 

 sure of capacity containing 3,200 Madras measures), and the Board 

 of Revenue found in 1885 that the local officers had committed many 

 mistakes in converting the quotations in terms of local measures into 

 quotations in terms of garce. The following are instances. In Ganjam 

 the local measures were converted to garce at the rate of 1,600 tooms 

 to a garce. The toom, however, is not a measure of uniform capacity 

 throughout the district, its contents in rice varying from 240 to 280 

 tolas at the several stations. The conversion is correct only as 

 regards those stations in which the toom of 240 tolas rice is in use. 

 In Cuddapah a garce was assumed to be equivalent to 3,200 local 

 measures of 132 tolas each or one-teAth more than its real contents. 

 In Kurnool the three varieties of local measures of 86, 114 and 132 



