pounds of dry compost, which, repeated for a second crop, would make an annual application of five to seven tons of dry compost per acre annually.  They do use, in addition to this compost, large amounts of bean and peanut cake, which carry all of the plant food elements derived from the soil which are contained in the beans and the peanuts.  If the vines are fed, or if the stems of the beaus are burned for fuel, most of the plant food elements in these will be returned to the field, and they have doubtless learned how to completely restore the plant food elements removed by their crops, and persistently do so.

The roads made by the Germans in the vicinity of Tsingtao enabled us to travel by ricksha into the adjoining country, and on one such trip we visited a village mill for grinding soy beans and peanuts in the manufacture of oil, and Fig. 136 shows the stone roller, four feet in diameter and two feet thick, which is revolved about a vertical axis on a circular stone plate, drawn by a donkey, crushing the kernels partly by its weight and partly by a twisting motion, for the arm upon which the roller revolves is very short.  After the meal had been ground the oil was expressed in essentially the same way as that described for the cotton seed, but the bean and peanut cakes are made much larger than the cotton seed cakes, about eighteen inches in diameter and three to four inches thick.  Two of these cakes are seen in Fig. 137, standing on edge outside the mill in an orderly clean court.  It is in this form that bean cake is exported in large quantities to different parts of China, and to Japan in recent years, for use as fertilizer, and very recently it is being shipped to Europe for both stock food and fertilizer.

Nowhere in this province, nor further north, did we see the large terra cotta, receptacles so extensively used in the south for storing human excreta.  In these dryer climates some method of desiccation is practiced and we found the gardeners in the vicinity of Tsingtao with quantities of the fertilizer stacked under matting shelters in the desiccated condition, this being finely pulverized in one or another way before it was applied.  The next illustration, Fig. 138, shows one of these piles being fitted for the garden, its thatched shelter standing behind the grandfather of a household.  His grandson was carrying the prepared fertilizer to the garden area seen in Fig. 139, where the father was working it into the soil.  The greatest pains is taken, both in reducing the product to a fine powder and in spreading and incorporating it with the soil, for one of their maxims of soil management is to make each square foot of field or garden the equal of every other in its power to produce.  In this manner each little holding is made to yield the highest returns possible under the conditions the husbandman is able to control.

From one portion of the area being fitted, a crop of artemisia had been harvested, giving a gross return at the rate of $73.19 per acre, and from another leeks had been taken, bringing a gross return of $43.86 per acre.  Chinese celery was the crop for which the ground was being fitted.