which materially aid in the destruction of injurious insects, oi 
which may prevent the wind from sweeping across the fields anc 
strewing them with spores of injurious fungi. 
Another peculiarity of sugar cultivation is the great length of 
time for which the fields are kept continuously under the same 
crops i Rotation of cron^ nf an#. .kind is hardly known dr this 
country. As. a any crop is'con'vtinatiUtay grown on the same 
soil till it absolutely fails to be remunerative, either from the 
ground getting quite exhausted, or from over^supply ceasing to 
bring a profit, and when it is considered that here we have no 
frosts to disintegrate the soil, and no winters to compulsorily 
rest it, few earthworms to turn it over, and no ploughs or deep 
digging machinery so that the ground gets barely any rest from 
incessant cropping, it seems wonderful in many cases that we gel 
the crops that we do. 
Constant cultivation on the same ground for a Jong period ol 
years — as much as twenty in many cases — might certainly be 
stopped by throwing out a field at regular intervals, each field 
being thrown out after a definite period, say, six or seven years 
and fallowed for a year. The objection to this is that a field 
when left is liable to become full of lalang grass or a creeping 
grass called Panicum distachyum which are both very difficult t( 
eradicate. Beans, or pea-nuts* Arachis hypogcea — may be used 
as a catch crop, and if looked after should soon cover the ground 
so that these grasses would not come up, and would of course be 
dug in eventually to manure the soil. The loss of the crop for 
the year would probably be repaid by the superior out-turn of the 
sugar for the next few years* and there is sufficient demand foi 
pea-nuts to make it worth while to collect the fruit of the plant. 
Deep ploughing by machinery could easily be effected in the 
cane fields, which are almost invariably flat, and could be readily 
worked. 
The planting of trees near the estates might well be encouraged. 
There would be no harm at least in planting roadside trees along 
the paths and roads throughout the estate, while fruit trees and 
other useful trees might well be planted in waste spots round the 
coolie-lines and the bungalows. As a rule, one seldom sees any 
useful birds except swallows and hawks in the sugar-estates, as 
there is really nowhere for them to roost still less nest in these 
open fields, and the smaller birds have but little chance of escape 
from the hawks if they do come. The amount of insect pests 
that some of the birds destroy is very large, and some encourage- 
ment might well be given them. 
High class cultivation such as is practised in Europe and 
North America does not as yet exist in the tropics, though im 
provements are being steadily made in this direction, but the 
absence of farm machinery from the peninsula undoubtedly does 
strike those coming from lands where cultivation is carried on in 
a more elaborate style. 
Yet another point is striking in sugar cultivation. It is one 
of the very few in which cultivation is carried on entirely as yet 
