V.
EXTENT OF CANALIZATION AND
SURFACE FITTING OF FIELDS.
On the evening of March 15th we left Canton for Hongkong
and the following day embarked again on the Tosa
Maru for Shanghai. Although our steamer stood so far
to sea that we were generally out of sight of land except
for some off-shore islands, the water was turbid most of
the way after we had crossed the Tropic of Cancer off the
mouth of the Han river at Swatow. Over a sea bottom
measuring more than six hundred miles northward along
the coast, and perhaps fifty miles to sea, unnumbered acre-feet
of the richest soil of China are being borne beyond the
reach of her four hundred millions of people and the children
to follow them. Surely it must be one of the great
tasks of future statesmanship, education and engineering
skill to divert larger amounts of such sediments close along
inshore in such manner as to add valuable new land
annually to the public domain, not alone in China but in all
countries where large resources of this type are going to
waste.
In the vast Cantonese delta plains which we had just left, in the still more extensive ones of the Yangtse kiang to which we were now going, and in those of the shifting Hwang ho further north, centuries of toiling millions have executed works of almost incalculable magnitude, fundamentally along such lines as those just suggested. They have accomplished an enormous share of these tasks by sheer force of body and will, building levees, digging ca-
