of coffee in the Kandyan
provinces may hereafter prove exaggerated, and that much that has been
attributed to the poverty of the soil may eventually be traced to
deficiency of skill on the part of the early planters.

[Footnote 1: Since the above was written, attempts have been made,
chiefly by natives to plant coffee on patena land. The result is a
conviction that the cultivation is practicable, by the use of manures
from the beginning; whereas forest land is capable, for three or four
years at least, of yielding coffee without any artificial enrichment of
the soil.]

[Footnote 2: HUMBOLDT is disposed to ascribe the absence of trees in the
vast grassy plains of South America, to "the destructive custom of
setting fire to the woods, when the natives want to convert the soil
into pasture: when during the lapse of centuries grasses and plants have
covered the surface with a carpet, the seeds of trees can no longer
germinate and fix themselves in the earth, although birds and winds
carry them continually from the distant forests into the
Savannahs."--_Narrative_, vol. i. ch. vi. p. 242.]

The natives in the same lofty localities find no deficient returns in
the crops of rice, which they raise in the ravines and hollows, into
which the earth from above has been washed by the periodical rains; but
the cultivation of rice is so entirely dependent on the presence of
water, that no inference can be fairly drawn as to the quality of the
soil from the abundance of its harvest.

The fields on which rice is grown in these mountains form one of the
most picturesque and beautiful objects in the country of the Kandyans.
Selecting an angular recess where two hills converge, they construct a
series of terraces, raised stage above stage, and retiring as they
ascend along the slope of the acclivity, up which they are carried as
high as the soil extends.[1] Each terrace is furnished with a low ledge
in front, behind which the requisite depth of water is retained during
the germination of the seed, and what is superfluous is permitted to
trickle down to the one below it. In order to carry on this peculiar
cultivation the streams are led along the level of the hills, often from
a distance of many miles, with a skill and perseverance for which the
natives of these mountains have attained a great renown.

[Footnote 1: The conversion of the land into these hanging farms is
known in Ceylon as "assuedamizing," a term borrowed from the Kandy