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should warn you that many points in the above description have been 
controverted ; and in partieular it has been asserted, not only by Caleutta 
4 cs 
English newspapers, but by Government officers, that there exists no 
such rice as I have described as Rowa. 
RENOVATION oF Som ın Rice FIELDS. 
In the Rowa fields, as I describe them, the rice gets only rain-water, 
and the water drains from the fields into the rivers. Liebie says that 
i gal every year in the same 
e rivers annually replenish the soil 
n the west side of 
Burdwan to Orissa, the hills rise in many places gradually, and we see 
e 
inundated from the rivers. As we proceed further into the western 
ills we find V-shaped valleys terraced in narrow curved platforms ; 
the rain-water is led down gradually from one to anot 1er'; there is on 
the outer edge of each platform a little bank, usually not more than 6 to 
12 inches high, and the rice is therefore never more than a few inches 
land Roxburgh refers to, his account being drawn up in the Circars 
immediately south of Orissa, Not rarely in this kind of rice cultivation 
a bank is drawn across the upper part of the valley and a tank formed 
silt from the rivers. 
In the north and east of Bengal the hills rise very suddenly from the 
plains; there is little terraced rice, but there is a broad belt of land in 
which there is enough clay in the soil for Rowa, that extends from 
Mymensingh to Chittagong, In the most valuable rice land, as on the 
right hank of the Bruhmapootra, throughout the Zilla of Mymensingh, 
the water runs from the rice fields to the Bruhma ootra, and the fields 
Noakhili. The gross produce of swamp rice may be about as gea 
that of Rowa, though raised at a greater cost of labour; but the value 
of the crop per aere is very much less. 
am prepared to go further and to doubt whether even swamp rice 
gets much silt. Where the water from amuddy rapid river gets through 
its bank (which is the highest part of the country) and spreads out over 
