Note 21 — APPENDIX: AGRICULTURE IN FILIPINAS

Worcester says of the Ifugaos (ut supra, p. 829): “Their agriculture is little short of wonderful, and no one who has seen their dry stone dams, their irrigating ditches running for miles along precipitous hillsides and even crossing the faces of cliffs, and their irrigated terraces extending for thousands of feet up the mountain sides, can fail to be impressed (Pl. xxvi, xxxvii). When water must be carried across cliffs so hard and so broken that the Ifugaos cannot successfully work the stone with their simple tools, they construct and fasten in place great troughs made from the hollowed trunks of trees, and the same procedure is resorted to when cañons must be crossed, great ingenuity being displayed in building the necessary supporting trestle-work of timber. The nearly perpendicular walls of their rice paddies are usually built of stone, although near Quiangan, where the country is comparatively open and level, walls of clay answer the same purpose, and are used. The stone retaining walls are sometimes forty feet high, and so steep are the mountain sides that the level plots gained by building such walls and filling in behind them are often not more than twenty or thirty feet wide. I know of no more impressive example of primitive engineering than the terraced mountain sides of Nueva Vizcaya, beside which the terraced hills of Japan sink into insignificance.” ↑