139 
Rice is, on the whole, the more uncertain in its return the less the 
area grown : and being a crop of small cultivators there is a need of 
securing co-operation in working the larger areas. The. great plains 
of Rower Bengal have been worked for rice for ages and carry 
such a population that the produce is only exported in the years 
when the yield is considerable. In the course of time these 
plains have acquired a peculiar flora and a peculiar fauna, in response 
to the annual submerging of the surface of the land, which keeps 
out the dry-land weeds of more than ephemeral duration, and 
excludes by rendering homeless all ground- nesting animals or insects 
which pass one stage of their life underground. Thus it has come 
about that these Bengal plains are relatively without rats, and when 
plague established itself in Calcutta the villages long enjoyed 
immunity on account of their isolation. As they are relatively 
without rats, so are they relatively without some other pests which 
are known to do great damage here. The long ages of cultivation, 
its persistence and its completeness have thus wrought changes 
favourable to the crop in its relationship to other life. Rats in 
Malaya are possibly the worst pests of small areas of rice, and birds 
next : after them, come insects. As regards birds it is obvious that 
the more cleared the land the freer it may be ; and the same also in 
respect of elephants and wild pigs : so that the wide co-operative 
area in a large way escapes these. 
» Co-operation is wanted for irrigation. 
It is most interesting to observe with the eye of an ethnologist 
how in Malaya this needed co-operation has been obtained — how in 
Java, for instance, much of the land is held by the village collectively 
and parcelled out annually for rice-growing : how in the Malay 
Peninsula religious ceremonies have been adopted as a means of 
bringing the owners to work collectively. The fumigation of the 
seed with benzoin, and the prayers in the mosque, and all tlie poetry 
gathered about the soul of the rice is an equivalent for the 
prosaic scrap of paper on which a District Officer is empowered to 
write thou shalt repair thy runnels on this date and plant thy paddy 
on that. Whatever our feelings may be in regard to the liberty of 
the subject, I anticipate that no one will wish to contest the ~ argu- 
ment that the sawab is an unit, and that it is wise to coerce tlie 
cultivators of it just as they have been coerced in the past; 
because the State is the better off for the complete cultivation of 
any area of rice land. 
The next matter is the extension of the rice lands. 
Rice cultivation, bendang or wet rice cultivation and not ladang 
or dry rice cultivation, has established for itself two vigorous centres 
in the Peninsula, the one in the north, the other in -the neighbour- 
hood of Malacca, To the north it came as an extension only. Great 
and wonderfully settled kingdoms once existed from the Bay of 
Bengal to the China Sea across the belt of land from Rangoon to 
