usually aggregates about ten per cent of the government valuation placed on the land. The mean valuation placed on the irrigated fields, excluding Formosa and Karafuto, was in 1907, 35.35 yen per tan; that of the upland fields, 9.40 yen, and the genya and pasture lands were given a valuation of .22 yen per tan. These are valuations of $70.70, $18.80 and $.44, gold, per acre, respectively, and the taxes on forty acres of paddy field would be $282.80; $75.20 on forty acres of upland field, and $1.76, gold, on the same area of the genya and weed lands.
In the villages, where work of one or another kind is done for pay, Dr. Evans stated that a woman's wage might not exceed $8, Mexican, or $3.44, gold, per year, and when we asked how it could be worth a woman's while to work a whole year for so small a sum, his reply was, “If she did not do this she would earn nothing, and this would keep her in clothes and a little more.” A cotton spinner in his church would procure a pound of cotton and on returning the yam would receive one and a quarter pounds of cotton in exchange, the quarter pound being her compensation.
Dr. Evans also described a method of rooting slips from trees, practiced in various parts of China. The under side of a branch is cut, bent upward and split for a short distance; about this is packed a ball of moistened earth wrapped in straw to retain the soil and to provide for future watering; the whole may then be bound with strips of bamboo for greater stability. In this way slips for new mulberry orchards are procured.
At eight o'clock in the morning we entered the mouth of the Pei ho and wound westward through a vast, nearly sea-level, desert plain and in both directions, far toward the horizon, huge white stacks of salt dotted the surface of the Taku Government salt fields, and revolving in the wind were great numbers of horizontal sail windmills, pumping sea water into an enormous acreage of evaporation basins. In Fig. 196 may be seen five of the large
