144 
Peas and Beans. 
I pass to the third group of food-stuffs, namely, bean-seeds and 
the like. 
Rice-eaters cannot live on rice alone and always seek some food 
which provides them with nitrogenous substances. Most of them 
seek fish: but where -the caste system forbids fish too sternly and 
beans are procurable, beans are used. It is very interesting to 
observe the schism among the Brahmins of India whereby those 
of Bengal, beans apparently not having been easily procurable, have 
permitted themselves fish to save the race : and there are Brahmins 
also in Kanara who have gone the same way. The Burmese in 
a corresponding dilemma have developed a plea that he who takes 
the life pays the penalty, but he who eats the fish is blameless. 
The Malay free from the trammels of Buddhism or Brahminism, 
balances his diet with fish. But failing fish or some sort of flesh, 
beans are almost a necessity, and the demand of the Peninsula for 
them will always be great. We get them from the side of India 
and we get them from the side of China. We produce none. 
One of the chief reasons why we do not raise any, and I think 
the chief reason, is that bean crops are the produce of a more 
advanced condition of agriculture than ours. Further it is certainly 
to the Malay a more congenial occupation to fish thrCn to till his 
rice land for a second crop. 
Peas and beans are always rotational crops, sometimes of a 
more complicated rotation, but generally merely alternating with 
rice. Where they fall in the system depends on the climate. Thus 
in Assam they are sown on the last rain of the wet season to be 
watered afterwards by dew and an occasional storm. In drier places 
they occupy the land in the rainy season. Here they would take the 
place of the rice land fallow, as in Assam and as in Javaj but they 
could also be a subordinate crop to maize, at another season. 
The chief of the bean crops of Java is the soy bean — Glycine 
soja . It returns, at 3-4 months, it is said, more or less 3,200 lbs. 
per acre, which is more than the Manchurian soy bean usually 
yields in Northern China. Let it be remembered that there is 
considerable difference between the flat-seeded Java plant and the 
round-seeded Manchurian plant: and that the unsatisfactory results 
of experiments in the Malay Peninsula with Manchurian seed in no 
degree prove the Javanese plant not worth growing. 
Java, second to Glycine, grows in rice land various species of 
Phaseohis, notably Phaseolus radio tun, the Mung of India, P. vulgaris , 
the French bean, and P. lunatus, the Lima bean: also there are 
others. We know that we can grow these horticulturally in the 
Peninsula : and though I have no knowledge of any agricultural 
experiments, it is quite probable that success might attend them. 
