recognized that the phosphate deposits which we are beginning to return to our fields are but measures of fertility lost from older soils, and indices of processes still in progress.  The rivers of North America are estimated to carry to the sea more than 500 tons of phosphorus with each cubic mile of water.  To such loss modern civilization is adding that of hydraulic sewage disposal through which the waste of five hundred millions of people might be more than 194,300 tons of phosphorus annually, which could not be replaced by 1,295,000 tons of rock phosphate, 75 per cent pure.  The Mongolian races, with a population now approaching the figure named; occupying an area little more than one-half that of the United States, tilling less than 800,000 square miles of land, and much of this during twenty, thirty or perhaps forty centuries; unable to avail themselves of mineral fertilizers, could not survive and tolerate such waste.  Compelled to solve the problem of avoiding such wastes, and exercising the faculty which is characteristic of the race, they “cast down their buckets where they were”, as

A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel.  From the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal, “Water, water; we die of thirst!” The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back, “Cast down your bucket where you are.”  A second time the signal, “Water, water; Send us water!” ran up from the distressed vessel, and was answered, “Cast down your bucket where you are.”  And a third and fourth signal for water was answered, “Cast down your bucket where you are.”  The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket, and it came up full of fresh sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon river. Booker T. Washington, Atlanta address.

Not even in great cities like Canton, built in the meshes of tideswept rivers and canals; like Hankow on the banks of one of the largest rivers in the world; nor yet in modern Shanghai, Yokohama or Tokyo, is such waste permitted.  To them such a practice has meant race suicide and they have resisted the temptation so long that it has ceased to exist.

Dr. Arthur Stanley, Health officer of the city of Shanghai, in his annual report for 1899, considering this subject as a municipal problem, wrote: 

“Regarding the bearing on the sanitation of Shanghai of the relationship between Eastern and Western hygiene, it may be said, that if prolonged national life is indicative of sound sanitation, the Chinese are a race worthy of study by all who concern themselves with Public Health.  Even without the returns of a Registrar-General it is evident that in China the birth rate must very considerably exceed the death rate, and have done so in an average way during the three or four thousand years that the Chinese nation has existed.  Chinese hygiene, when compared with medieval English, appears to advantage.  The main