of some 250 of the brown Chinese geese, two-thirds grown, was watched by boys, gleaning their entire living from the grave lands and adjacent water.  A mature goose sells in Canton for $1.20, Mexican, or less than 52 cents, gold, but even then how can the laborer whose day’s wage is but ten or fifteen cents afford one for his family?  Here, too, we saw the Chinese persistent, never-ending industry in keeping their land, their sunshine and their rain, with themselves, busy in producing something needful.  Fields which had matured two crops of rice during the long summer, had been laboriously, and largely by hand labor, thrown into strong ridges as seen in Fig. 40, to permit still a third winter crop of some vegetable to be taken from the land.

But this intensive, continuous cropping of the land spells soil exhaustion and creates demands for maintenance and restoration of available plant food or the adding of large quantities of something quickly convertible into it, and so here in the fields on Honam Island, as we had found in Happy Valley, there was abundant evidence of the most careful attention and laborious effort devoted to plant feeding.  The boat standing in the canal in Fig. 41 had come from Canton in the early morning with two tons of human manure and men were busy applying it, in diluted form, to beds of leeks at the rate of 16,000 gallons per acre, all carried on the shoulders in such pails as stand in the foreground.  The material is applied with long-handled dippers holding a gallon, dipping it from the pails, the men wading, with bare feet and trousers rolled above the knees, in the water of the furrows between the beds.  This is one of their ways of “feeding the crop,” and they have other methods of “manuring the soil.”

One of these we first met on Honam Island.  Large amounts of canal mud are here collected in boats and brought to the fields to be treated and there left to drain and dry before distributing.  Both the material used to feed the crop and that used for manuring the land are waste products, hindrances to the industry of the region, but the Chinese make them do essential duty in maintaining its life.  The human waste must be disposed of.  They return it to the soil.  We turn it into the sea.  Doing so, they save for plant feeding more than a ton of phosphorus (2712 pounds) and more than two tons of potassium (4488 pounds) per day for each million of adult population.  The mud collects in their canals and obstructs movement.  They must be kept open.  The mud is highly charged with organic matter and would add humus to the soil if applied to the fields, at the same time raising their level above the river and canal, giving them better drainage; thus are they turning to use what is otherwise waste, causing the labor which must be expended in disposal to count in a remunerative way.