(by decree of Sept. 13, 1858); and, as a result of this, a royal decree
of May 29, 1861, founded there a school o£ botany and agriculture,
under the control of the governor of the islands and immediate
supervision of the Economic Society. The locality called Campo de
Arroceros ["the rice-dealers' field"] was set apart as a botanical
garden, for the practical work of that school, with approval of
the expenditures incurred by the governor for the establishment of
both institutions; and the sum of 6,000 pesos a year was allowed for
their maintenance. (In 1894-95, the budget included for the expenses
of these two establishments the sum of 37,294 pesos.) See Montero y
Vidal, Hist. de Filipinas, iii, pp. 260, 261, 317, 318.
[237] 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."