Rice culture is the natural pursuit of the Javanese or Sundanese native. Coffee, sugar, and tea he cultivates on compulsion for wages with which to pay his taxes. Now the land of Java is divided into two classes, land capable of being inundated by streams or rivers called _sawah_, and land not so inundated called _tegal_, or _gaga_. On the latter only the less important crops, such as mountain rice or Indian corn, are grown. On sawah land the rice is grown in terraces, which are so arranged that, without any machinery for raising or cisterns for storing the water, a perfectly natural and perpetual supply is gained from the high mountains, which serve here the same useful purpose that the great river Nile does in Egypt. The small fields are worked with the _patjoel_, a sort of hoe, and the large with the plough (_wloekoe_), and then inundated. After ten or fifteen days they are hoed again, so that any places not reached by the plough or hoe may be laboured, and the intervening banks kept free from weeds and consequently made porous. The large sawahs are also harrowed with the _garoe_; and, finally, small trenches are cut for the water to flow from one terrace to another. When the earth has thus been worked into a mass of liquid mud, the young plants are transplanted from the beds in which they have been sown about a month previously, and carefully placed in this soft mud. Inundation is necessary until the rice is nearly ripe, which is naturally about August or September. It is reaped with a short knife called _ani-ani_, with which the reaper cuts off each separate ear with a few inches of the stem; and the ears are then threshed by being placed in a hollow tree trunk and there stamped with a _toemboekan_, a heavy piece of wood with a broad end. The lands are ploughed, harrowed, and weeded by the men, but the transplanting, reaping, and threshing is done by women. A curious circumstance in rice-cultivation is the fact that side by side the crops may be seen in each of the separate stages, planting and reaping often going on simultaneously. Beside the rice, a crop of beans or sweet potatoes is grown in the year, and the flooded terraces are also utilized as fish-tanks, in which gold-fish are grown to the length of a foot and a half and then eaten. They are brought to the market in _water_, and so kept fresh, and, if not sold, are of course returned to their "pastures" again.