Under the heading "Tagals," a description is given of the planting of paddy, and an illustration shows the aspect of a newly-planted paddy-field or tubigan. Mountain rice-lands are called bacores or dalatanes. The cutting and harvesting of paddy is paid for in kind, sometimes in Camarines Sur, a third of the crop is given for getting it in, but in the province of Manila it is cultivated in equal shares to the farmer and the owner of the land. By looking at the illustration it will be seen that, the fields being divided into such small patches of irregular shapes at different levels, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to use a reaping-machine. I have elsewhere given the reasons for my opinion that the cultivation of rice is the lowest use that the land and the husbandmen can be put to, and whenever the cultivation is given up, it is probably an indication that the cultivators are raising some more profitable crop, and earning money by exporting valuable produce, wherewith to import rice from countries in a lower stage of civilisation. This is most certainly the case in the Philippines, and year by year, as the exports of hemp, sugar and tobacco have increased, the imports of rice from Saigon and Rangoon have risen correspondingly. And yet the United States' Department of Agriculture, issued in the latter part of 1899 a circular with the title,'Plant Products of the Philippines,' [15] which, amongst other inaccurate appreciations, says: "It seems strange that an almost exclusively agricultural country should not produce enough food for its own population, but such is at present the case with regard to the Philippines." It proceeds to say that in some years the value of rice imported into Manila from Saigon was valued at $2,000,000. But I would point out to the author of that circular that the export of the three great staples of the Philippines in those years averaged, perhaps, $30,000,000, and this, evidently, could not have been accomplished if they had cultivated their own rice. The Spaniards sometimes raised this same groundless clamour, and, perhaps, the author of the circular took it from them; but I look upon it as a great mistake arising from insufficient knowledge of the subject. The rice imported into Manila is largely shipped to the tobacco and hemp provinces, Cagayan and Albay, where the people are exclusively employed in the cultivation and preparation of those valuable products, and are far richer, and on a higher grade of civilisation than the rice-growers of Cochin China. In the Philippines themselves, the people of the rice-growing districts are the poorest and most backward of all. Besides paddy, the natives cultivate the dava or míjo (Panicum miliaceum), the mongo, a species of lentil (Phaseolus mungo), called in some provinces balat or balatong, for their own consumption.