The Halles Centrales occupy an entire square in the center of the city and cost $75,000, exclusive of the site. Gardeners and farmers are not permitted to sell their produce on the way to the market and are only allowed to deliver to storekeepers after the wholesale markets are closed. Here, as elsewhere where the markets are successful, every precaution is taken to avoid the prosperity of the market being dissipated by sales in the surrounding neighborhood. The annual rents for butchers are very moderate, ranging from $57.90 to $154.40, vegetable dealers $42.85 to $92.64; dairy produce dealers $52.11 to $85.11, fishmongers $23.16 to $86.85. In the wholesale markets there is an annual trade turnover worth well above $1,000,000, of which fish represents $280,000. So far from the fishermen finding the fish market detrimental to their interests, they welcome it and cheerfully observe the rule forbidding sales on the quays or transit sheds except under special permits. LYONS, with a population of half a million, may be taken as the best example of a flourishing French provincial city at a considerable distance from the sea. The principal market, La Halle, is known all over France for its public auctions. Accommodation is provided for 276 stalls, rented at 14 cents a day per square meter for fruit, vegetables and cheese, while other stalls for meat and fish are rented at 33 cents per square meter. At the morning auctions, held at the rear of the hall, are sold immense quantities of fish, oysters, lobsters, game, poultry, butter, cheese, eggs, fruit and vegetables. There is a rule that all supplies must come from outside Lyons, so that local store men cannot there dispose of surplus stocks, but dealers in other French cities often thus relieve themselves when overloaded. These auctions not only enable local dealers to distribute supplies at cheap rates to the small stores all over the city, but wide awake housewives can frequently tell just what the stores gave wholesale for the produce offered to them retail later in the day, so a check can be kept on overcharges. The auctioneers are given a monopoly of selling for ten years, on binding themselves to pay to the city a sum equal to two per cent on the total annual sales. The minimum is fixed at $1,930 for one stand or $5,650 for four stands, to be paid to the municipal treasury. Two per cent is added to the purchase price of every payment made by buyers at auction, and if this does not amount to $1,930 per stand for the year, the auctioneer has to make up the difference. The poorer classes benefit largely by these sales, banding together to buy wholesale and then dividing their purchases. [Illustration: A DRASTIC INSPECTION Of Refrigerated Chinese Pork at the Port of Liverpool.]