Page:Voyage in search of La Perouse, volume 2 (Stockdale).djvu/395

] During our march from Sourabaya to Samarang, I had been surprised to observe in the market places of several villages, shops where small flat squares of a reddish clay, called by the inhabitants tana ampo, were exposed for sale. At first I imagined that they might be employed for fulling cloths; but I soon observed the inhabitants chewing small quantities of this clay, and they assured me that this was all the use they made of it.

Whilst we were passing through the extensive rice plantations at the foot of the mountains, the natives had frequently pointed out to us, fields of rice upon declivities too steep to be able to retain the water. The rice cultivated in these places was of a species, that does not require an inundated soil to succeed perfectly well; but they only cultivate it in the season when the land is daily drenched with copious rains.

I had already remarked upon several hills in the island of Java, a great number of cocoa-trees which were stripped of their leaves and dead at the root. It had appeared very singular to me to find so great a number within so small a space; but I was at length informed, by several of the inhabitants of the hills situated at a little distance north-west of Samarang, where I saw many cocoa-trees in the same condition, that they had