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The World's Commercial Products 



After this everything is burned as far as possible. The primitive farmer uses the wood 

 that can be removed, piling it up as a hedge round his field. The thick tree-stumps, hardly 

 attacked by the fire at all, remain ; the felled trunks which resisted the fire he simply leaves 

 lying where they are. These are often nearly fifty yards long and so enormous that a 

 grown-up man cannot look over them. 



Now the rainy season is coming when the sowing must begin. The cleared spot has to be 

 dug, and sometimes trenches are made. A small guard-house is erected, for all sorts of 

 animals might otherwise make short work of the harvest, or perhaps even eat the sown seed. 

 There are the elephants, very fond of rice plants, and capable of trampling down the hedge ; 

 deer, boars, monkeys, and other animals, who would deprive man of his harvest without the 

 least respect for his hedge of half-burned wood. 



A SIMPLE METHOD OF IRRIGATING A RICE FIELD IN SIAM 



When all this is ready the people get out their planting-sticks. In the civilised world 

 a planting-stick is a simple piece of wood without any external characteristic. After long 

 use it has perhaps been polished by the rough hand of the field-labourer. But here it ranks 

 higher, as one of the few agricultural tools. It is sometimes very long, so that he who uses 

 it need not stoop. It is made of very hard wood, ebony, perhaps, for it must be strong enough 

 not to break against the roots, which are left in the soil, and it is ornamented as such an 

 important tool should be. In the holes made with the planting-stick are put a few seeds of 

 the kind of rice that grows in dry soil, covered with earth, and pressed down with the feet. 

 If rain is abundant there is a chance of a good harvest. A second crop may perhaps 

 be obtained from the same ground. Then the field which has been cleared with so 

 much trouble and at the cost of so many fine trees is abandoned. The people wander to 

 another part of the wood, there to make a new clearing. The old one with its chopped trees, 

 still standing, and its big trunks rotting on the ground, is left to nature. The tropical 



