34 AGRICULTURE ANP FORESTRY, 



row-planting is done with the hand merely, or perhaps with a stick 

 to drill holes. The former is, accordingly, employed in farming on 

 a large scale, while the latter is more in use among small farmers 

 and gardeners. Although row-planting, of which planting in hills 

 is only a special form {e.g. beans), has long been customary, broad- 

 cast sowing has been and is yet always the rule in Germany, where 

 only of late and on large estates it has been laid aside. In the 

 South of P'rance, around Bordeaux for instance, sowing in rows has 

 long been thoroughly carried out, and the fields for winter crops have 

 in consequence been divided into long narrow strips, as in Japan. 



The Chinese and Japanese farmer, who works only with simple 

 tools, avails himself almost exclusively of row and terrace-planting, 

 except in the case of the little seed-beds in which he cultivates 

 the seedlings of rice and other growths. It is intimately bound 

 up with the entire agricultural system of Eastern Asia, and possesses 

 a number of advantages — economy of seed, and simultaneous and 

 equal sprouting, rooting, and development, in consequence of the 

 seeds having been placed at an even depth and an equal dis- 

 tance apart ; but above all, greater possibility of loosening the soil 

 often and keeping it clear, and a better opportunity of watering 

 and manuring the plants while growing. Finally, too, it permits 

 of sowing for a second crop weeks before the first is ripe for 

 harvesting. Thus, in the province of Higo, wheat is sown in rows 

 in autumn, beside the maturing rice ; and near Sakai, in the plain 

 of Ozaka, cotton is sown in spring beside winter barley. I have 

 often observed tobacco and rape to be nurtured in the seedbed, and 

 then transplanted to the fields when the latter had become free. 



With their loose soil, unencumbered with stones and weeds, the 

 Japanese are not acquainted with the obstacles which oppose 

 drilling in other countries, and make it necessary to sow by hand. 

 And it is a fact, that, when skilfully done and on fertile soil, 

 broadcast scattering, as experience teaches, brings richer harvests, 

 because the stalks grow closer together. 



The greater part of the Japanese rice-lands lie fallow all the 

 winter, for either the soil is not strong enough, or the winter is too 

 long for the succession of a winter crop and a second harvest. 

 Soaked with water, and in part covered over, it becomes, with its 

 neighbouring ditches and their dead rushes, the gathering-place 

 of rnany water-fowl, in the inclement season. Only in milder 

 districts and on particularly fertile land, are the fields turned into 

 a dry Jiata after the rice-harvest ; and then comes the planting 

 of barley, wheat, peas, broad-beans, rape, mustard, or radishes, 

 with which the other kind of ground is also covered, that which 

 serves for all kinds of dry-crops in summer. 



When rice harvest is over, about the end of October, the ground, 

 already dried, is subjected to a thorough turning-over with the hoe, 

 and the field is divided into long, narrow, high beds, in which the 

 seed is planted in from two to four rows, from twelve to eighteen 



