The Indian agriculturist,--"Ryot,"--can in no sense be compared to the American farmer, but rather to the late serf of Russia. He is a tenant on hard conditions, and is by custom and bigotry almost a fixture on the spot of land where he was born; his farming is done on a very small scale and according to old methods, to which he clings with religious veneration; his wants are very few, and he endures poverty and even hunger with patience; he cultivates his patch of five to fifteen acres on shares for the landed proprietor,--"zemindar,"--who holds under rental to the government, and the better half of his gross income generally goes to the zemindar, the priest (Brahmin) and the usurer, in the form of rent, presents, offerings and interest, and if he can net ten cents a day by his hard and hopeless labor, that will suffice for the most pressing wants of his household. His home is a mud, or bamboo-hut, his property a pair of small bullocks, a few cows, calves and goats, a wooden cart, and a few brass and earthen pots, in all worth about fifty dollars, and his implements and tools are of the rudest kind, such as his ancestors used a thousand years ago; and yet he is making some progress under British rule, and finds his wants increasing, and at the same time better outlets for his produce and better recompense for his labor, and on the whole, is so independent on ten cents a day, that he will eat or store his wheat rather than sell it below a certain price. Of course he does not employ machinery in farming, but plows his land with a crooked piece of iron-pointed wood, harrows it with an instrument resembling a common ladder laid flat on the ground and dragged by little bullocks crossways over the field; he sows by hand, reaps with a rude sickle, carries the sheaves home on his back or in the bullock cart, threshes them with a wooden club, or lets the cattle tramp out the grain, and cleans it by hand-winnowing. [Illustration: LABORERS AT THE INDIGO PRESS.] India of course yields a great number of other kinds of agricultural products, especially the indigo plant, from which the renowned dye-stuff is made; rape, mustard and other species of seeds from which oils are pressed, the opium plant, etc.