298 TlMEHRI. 
In that country only one crop is raised in a year, and as 
all of the planting has to be done at one time, a great 
strain is thrown on the labour market. Here, as I have 
stated, three crops can be raised in a year, and no atten- 
tion whatever has had to be paid to the seasons. It is not 
at all uncommon to see here one acre with four or five 
crops of different ages on it. 
The limits of this article do not allow of my going 
very deeply into the question of rice-cleaning. It is done 
here by pounding the rice in a mortar, the pestle of 
which is attached to a lever worked by a man's foot. 
The cost of converting two bags of paddy into one of 
very well cleaned rice, is about two shillings. I have 
gone to a great deal of trouble in searching for a machine 
to clean rice on a comparatively small scale, but can hear 
of none that is working satisfa6lorily. Some idea of the 
difficulty of constru6ling such a machine may be gathered 
from the following list of separate and distin6l machines 
used in a rice-cleaning mill in Liverpool : Sieve and 
Aspirator, Shelling Stones, Scouring Machines, Blower, 
Decorticators one or more in succession, Blower, 
Polishers in succession, Blower, and Sieve. The Liver- 
pool rice-mills are not constructed so as to be able to 
deal with paddy. What is cleaned there is called 
" cargo rice," which is about four parts of clean rice 
and one part of paddy. All of the cargo rice is shelled 
and milled in large mills at the rice ports in Burmah, 
India, &c. When enough rice is grown in the colony 
to meet its consumption of 250,000 bags, there will be 
plenty of work for a good mill, but until then I fear we 
must keep to the primitive " stamper-pot/' as the rice 
mortar is called. 
