AGHieULTURAL ffiAGAZinG, 
COLOMBO. 
Added as a Sttpplement Monthly to the " TROPICAL AGRICULTUBIST," 
The following pages include the Contents of the Agricultural Magazine for 
July :- 
Vol. XII.] JULY, 1900. ^ [No. 1. 
THE AGRICULTURAL COMMISSION AND 
THE IMPROVEMENT OP NATIVE 
AGRICULTURE. 
HE Eeport of the Commission ap- 
pointed to report on the advis- 
bility of a Department of Agricul- 
ture being established ior Ceylon 
has at lust been made public, 
aud it would appear from 
reviews of it published in the Press, that the 
general opinion with regard to the document is 
to the effect that it affords exceedingly interest 
\n<y reading, containing as it does the views of 
high Government officials as well as of private 
gentlemen of standing, but that it has failed to 
enunciate a practical scheme for dealing with 
the native agriculture of the country. 
In this connection we might refer to another 
scheme which we understand has been forwarded lu 
Government— the author of which is W r. E. Elli itt, 
late Government Agent of the Southern Province, 
who since his retirement has been working as 
a private agriculturist ; and so, having exp'erience 
(and that varied and extensive) of native 
agriculture both as an official and an unofficial, 
i^ eminently qualified to advise on a question 
of this nature. We understand that Mr. Elliott 
deprecates the merging of the interests of what 
is kuowa as European agriculture with those 
of Native agriculture, as there is so little ia 
common between the two. Besides, the latter 
has its own powerful machinery in the Planters 
Association of Ceylon to protect its own 
interests, while the Government of the Colony 
has liberally provided help in the appoint- 
ment of a number of expert scientists to further 
protect those interests. Mr. Elliott's scheme 
provides for a re-orgaiased Central School, 
of Agriculture, which already exists, and a 
Central Experimental Farm not far from Colombo, 
with branch experimental gardens all over the 
country. His whole scheme is calculated to directly 
reach the village cultivator, and to this end he 
recommends that the men to be trained at the 
Central School should be drawn from the culti- 
vating classes, that the teaching should be in the 
vernacular, and that the curiculum should be so 
revised as to entirely serve the requirements 
of the classes to be reached. The scheme further 
a.; vises the retention of the mechanism for 
controlling and working this sub-department of 
agriculture in the department of Public Instruc- 
tion, which is already so closely in touch with 
the village population through its extensive 
system of vernacular education. We cannot do 
more than generally indicate the outlines of 
this excellent scheme, which novel and original 
though it is, appears to us to be better calculated to 
effect the object which the Government has so 
long striven, but unsuccessfully, to attain, 
