With our broad fields, our machinery and few people, their system appears to us crude and impossible, but cut our holdings to the size of theirs and the same stroke makes our machinery, even our plows, still more impossible, and so the more one studies the environment of these people, thus far unavoidable, their numbers, what they have done and are doing, against what odds they have succeeded, the more difficult it becomes to see what course might have been better.

How full with work is the month which precedes the transplanting of rice has been pointed out,—­the making of the compost fertilizer; harvesting the wheat, rape and beans; distributing the compost over the fields, and their flooding and plowing.  In Fig. 160 one of these fields is seen plowed, smoothed and nearly ready for the plants.  The turned soil had been thoroughly pulverized, leveled and worked to the consistency of mortar, on the larger fields with one or another sort of harrow, as seen in Figs. 160 and 161.  This thorough puddling of the soil permits the plants to be quickly set and provides conditions which ensure immediate perfect contact for the roots.

When the fields are ready women repair to the nurseries with their low four-legged bamboo stools, to pull the rice plants, carefully rinsing the soil from the roots, and then tie them into bundles of a size easily handled in transplanting, which are then distributed in the fields.

The work of transplanting may be done by groups of families changing work, a considerable number of them laboring together after the manner seen in Fig. 163, made from four snap shots taken from the same point at intervals of fifteen minutes.  Long cords were stretched in the rice field six feet apart and each of the seven men was setting six rows of rice one foot apart, six to eight plants in a hill, and the hills eight or nine inches apart in the row.  The, bundle was held in one hand and deftly, with the other, the desired number of plants were selected with the fingers at the roots, separated from the rest and, with a single thrust, set in place in the row.  There was no packing of earth about the roots, each hill being set with a single motion, which followed one another in quick succession, completing one cross row of six hills after another.  The men move backward across the field, completing one entire section, tossing the unused plants into the unset field.  Then reset the lines to cover another section.  We were told that the usual day’s work of transplanting, for a man under these conditions, after the field is fitted and the plants are brought to him, is two mow or one-third of an acre.  The seven men in this group would thus set two and a third acres per day and, at the wage Mrs. Wu was paying, the cash outlay, if the help was hired, would be nearly 21 cents per acre.  This is more cheaply than we are able to set cabbage and tobacco plants with our best machine methods.  In Japan, as seen in Figs. 164 and 165, the women participate in the work of setting the plants more than in China.