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■*1 
about half way up the stalks; when it is shut off. 
Water is retained in the plots till the rice comes 
into bearing and the fruit shows signs of ripening; 
then the land is drained. 
Reaping is done chiefly by the women and a 
curious form of knife is used, which necessitates 
the cutting of the crop ear by ear. Malays dislike 
a more wholesale method of reaping as they say 
that if they use a sickle they reap unripe heads as 
well as ripe, and also that the soul of the rice would 
desert them as, where the sickle is used, the grain 
is afterwards roughly beaten out of the heads at 
the ends of their long stalks. The Malay method 
of reaping is to cut through the stem close under 
the ear, and the grain is subsequently trodden out 
with the feet. 
Dry-growing rice is largely planted in jungle 
clearings on hill-sides. No nursery is made in this 
case, the grain merely being spwn in holes made 
with a long dibble. Such a clearing will not give 
a good rice crop for more than one season, though 
it may be used for another year or so for planting 
root-crops, such as yams and for growing gourds, 
bananas and chillies. Rice is often stored in a little 
out-house near the house proper. 
Second to agriculture as a native occupation, 
comes fishing, since a considerable part of the 
coastal population depends upon this pursuit for a 
livelihood, while the riverine Malays engage in it 
as a spare-time occupation, partly to supplement 
their food supply, partly as a sport and partly to 
supplement their incomes by the sale of their 
catches. , 
The methods of taking fish employed by the 
fisherman of the coast are many and various, in- 
cluding fish-spears, hand-lines baited and weighted 
