mean yield of rice per acre in these countries were forty bushels for the water rice and twenty bushels for the dry land rice, the acreage required to give this production would be:
| Area. | ||
| Water rice, sq. miles. |
Dry land rice, sq. miles. | |
| In China | 78,073 | 4,004 |
| In Korea | 2,285 | 117 |
| In Japan | 12,534 | 321 |
| Sum | 92,892 | 4,442 |
| Total | 97,334 | |
Our observations along the four hundred miles of railway in Korea between Antung, Seoul and Fusan, suggest that the land under rice in this country must be more rather than less than that computed, and the square miles of canalized land in China, as indicated on pages 97 to 102, would indicate an acreage of rice for her quite as large as estimated.
In the three main islands of Japan more than fifty per cent of the cultivated land produces a crop of water rice each year and 7.96 per cent of the entire land area of the Empire, omitting far-north Karafuto. In Formosa and in southern China large areas produce two crops each year. At the large mean yield used in the computation the estimated acreage of rice in China proper amounts to 5.93 per cent of her total area and this is 7433 square miles greater than the acreage of wheat in the United States in 1907. Our yield of wheat, however, was but 19,000,000 tons, while China's output of rice was certainly double and probably three times this amount from nearly the same acreage of land; and notwithstanding this large production per acre, more than fifty per cent, possibly as high as seventy-five per cent, of the same land matures at least one other crop the same year, and much of this may be wheat or barley, both chiefly consumed as human food.
Had the Mongolian races spread to and developed in North America instead of, or as well as, in eastern Asia,
