Miscellaneous. 



[March 1907. 



great millet, cotton, Bengal gram, etc. ; metla guniilca (bullock hoe with rectangular 

 shares), dante, pitta guntika, a'ia or usi gorru, and other sorts of bullock hoes; 

 the threshing stone roller, and various tools worth immediate adoption by the 

 Tamil ryot, such as the acchu kattu dante (an efficient time and labour-saving 

 wooden mamuti with a long handle for laying out irrigation plots) ; kurchige and 

 idlavi for weeding young crops, improved forms of reaping knives, etc. 



The implements and tools above referred to are for the most part used not 

 only in the Telugu, but also in a large part of the Canarese country in this Presi- 

 dency (the Western and Southern parts of Bellary, the Kollegal Taluk, and part 

 of South Canara), the Mysore State, the Canarese and Marata country in the 

 Bombay Presidency, and many other parts of Northern India where dry cultivation 

 prevails, including parts of Punjab. It was in the Punjab, if 1 recollect right, 

 that Sir James Caird, the Famine Commissioner of 1876-78, and one of the greatest 

 agricultural authorities in England, was simply beside himself with admiration 

 at the simplicity, efficiency, and cheapness of the bamboo drill, the offspring of 

 the country plough costing rupees which may be counted on the fingers of one 

 hand as compared with Garret's, Bird's and other seed drills invented by Jethro 

 Tall, on the principal of the piano, costing several hundred rupees and doing 

 scarcely more or better work in a given time. The gorru, guntika, etc., are 

 probably an Aryan invention adopted by the undivided Dravidiau stock of Telugu 

 and Canarese people after the separation of the Tamilians and the Malayalese. 

 Reference may be made on this point to a certain Bulletin of the Madras Agricultural 

 Department, price one rupee. 



It is strange that the gorru guntika, etc., should have been in use from time 

 immemorial in the Kollegal taluk of the Coimbatore districts without being taken the 

 slightest notice of by people who have gone there from other parts of the district, and 

 seen them at work. Being a Coimbatorean, I had opportunities to enquire of many 

 a ryot who had gone to Kollegal what he thought of the kurige (Canarese term 

 for the bamboo seed drill). What one of the men who had returned from Kollegal, 

 to a village near Tudiyalur, said, shows the general implement was as much a 

 desacharam (custom of the country) as the smoking of the cigars by the Brahmins 

 of the Northern country, and he cared no more to enquire the merits of that imple- 

 ment than about the benefits which might accrue to the Southern Brahmins from 

 smoking cigars. 



The question may arise as to whether the cultivators of the arid black 

 cotton soil tract who manifestly invented the gorru guntika, etc., are, as a class 

 naturally more intelligent than the people of Tanjore, etc., where the plough alone, 

 as said above, performs multifarious functions. It is a well established fact that 

 an organ of the animal economy, or an instrument for physical work, which is 

 designed to perform any of several kinds of work cannot so well perform any of 

 those kinds of work as an organ or instrument specially for doing one specific kind 

 of work alone. The various economical implements of husbandry came to be 

 invented by the cultivator of the black cotton soil tract who had to contend against 

 scantiness of rainfall, absence of irrigation and other difficulties, adversity having 

 its u*es, and necessity being the mother of invention. It is the Tanjorcan's boast 

 that he has scarcely anything to do except to kick the field bund aside and let 

 in water to raise a bumper crop of paddy. But the Tanjorean, his cattle and hia 

 plough, when placed by the side of the Deccan Reddi and his corresponding chattels, 

 looks as dimunitive as would the Pigmies of Africa standing side by side with the 

 Patagonians* That wet cultivation engenders perfunctionary habits of cultivation 



has been the opinions of agricultural observers like the late Mr. W. R, 

 ftobertsoiii 



