the adoption of irrigation practices in humid climates where water exists in abundance.  Sooner or later we must adopt a national policy which shall more completely conserve our water resources, utilizing them not only for power and transportation, but primarily for the maintenance of soil fertility and greater crop production through supplemental irrigation, and all these great national interests should be considered collectively, broadly, and with a view to the fullest and best possible coordination.  China, Korea and Japan long ago struck the keynote of permanent agriculture but the time has now come when they can and will make great improvements, and it remains for us and other nations to profit by their experience, to adopt and adapt what is good in their practice and help in a world movement for the introduction of new and improved methods.

In selecting rice as their staple crop; in developing and maintaining their systems of combined irrigation and drainage, notwithstanding they have a large summer rainfall; in their systems of multiple cropping; in their extensive and persistent use of legumes; in their rotations for green manure to maintain the humus of their soils and for composting; and in the almost religious fidelity with which they have returned to their fields every form of waste which can replace plant food removed by the crops, these nations have demonstrated a grasp of essentials and of fundamental principles which may well cause western nations to pause and reflect.

While this country need not and could not now adopt their laborious methods of rice culture, and while, let us hope, those who come after us may never be compelled to do so, it is nevertheless quite worth while to study, for the sake of the principles involved, the practices they have been led to adopt.

Great as is the acreage of land in rice in these countries but little, relatively, is of the dry land type, and the fields upon which most of the rice grows have all been graded to a water level and surrounded by low, narrow raised rims, such as may be seen in Fig. 149 and in Fig. 150, where three men are at work on their foot-power pump, flooding fields preparatory to transplanting the rice.  If the country was not level then the slopes have been graded into horizontal terraces varying in size according to the steepness of the areas in which they were cut.  We saw these often no larger than the floor of a small room, and Professor Ross informed me that he walked past those in the interior of China no larger than a dining table and that he saw one bearing its crop of rice, surrounded by its rim and holding water, yet barely larger than a good napkin.  The average area of the paddy field in Japan is officially reported at 1.14 se, or an area of but 31 by 40 feet.  Excluding Hokkaido, Formosa and Karafuto, fifty-three per cent of the irrigated rice lands in Japan are in allotments smaller than one-eighth of an acre, and seventy-four per cent