42 Indian Agriculture in its Phyncal Aspects. 
come to, those who are well acquainted with India can readily 
testify, and the time, alas ! has been only too short to exhaust 
the interest in or to do justice to the subject. However, with 
the facilities so readily put at my service, I was able to make a 
tour in each of the six provinces, viz. the Punjab, the North- 
West Provinces and Oudh, Bengal, the Central Provinces, 
Bombay, and Madras, and I visited each one twice, viz. once 
in the cold season, and again during the rains. 
The first and most natural differences that strike the newly- 
arrived visitor are the prevailing heat and the ever-jiresent sun, 
features playing a most important part in determining the 
agriculture of India. As the journey is made from Bombay or 
other seaport into the open country, the town is rapidly left, 
and many an hour or even a whole day may be passed in the 
train before another town of an)^ considerable size is met with, 
for agriculture is the staple industry and occupation of the 
people. But in place of the wide and often undulating fields of 
England, the monotony of crop-growing pleasantly broken here 
and there by the variation of pasture land with its feeding herds 
of cattle and sheep, we find in India a level plain stretching for 
many miles along our route, and split up into almost minute 
divisions, upon which not one but several crops or patches of 
crops may be seen growing. No hedges nor even stone walls 
mark the boundaries either of field or holding, for, in all but a 
few special districts, hedges, properly so called, will not grow, and 
in other parts one may traverse a thousand miles without 
coming across a stone even the size of a pebble. 
It is not a land of large, but of very small holdings, the 
average area belonging to a cultivating tenant being only about 
five acres. On this small space he and his family, and often his 
brothers or other relatives with their families as well, exist — 
living, as it were, under a communal system. No trees surround 
the fields or break the landsca])e, unless where a poor and barren 
stretch will not repay cultivation, and has been left to jungle 
growth or remains a bare parched spot. Along the coast line 
may be seen dotted here and there the tall cocoanut tree ; but its 
region is soon left behind, and an occasional imlmyra, or toddy- 
palm, takes its place. It is only when the journey, it may be of 
several days' length, brings one to the mountain or hilly regions, 
that the vast forests are met with and fringe the cultivated area ; 
otherwise, the general appearance of the country is that of a 
vast, heated, and, apart from the agriculture, uninteresting plain. 
The workers we see on these small five-acre holdings are 
not the day labourers, with the farmer walking busily amongst 
tbem, but the tenant himself and his family, each taking his and 
