In both of these cases the crops grown were wheat, barley, large and small millet, sweet potatoes and soy beans or peanuts. Much straw braid is manufactured in the province by the women and children in their homes, and the cargo of the steamer on which we returned to Shanghai consisted almost entirely of shelled peanuts in gunny sacks and huge bales of straw braid destined for the manufacture of hats in Europe and America. Shantung has only moderate rainfall, little more than 24 inches annually, and this fact has played an important part in determining the agricultural practices of these very old people. In Fig. 123 is a closer view than Fig. 27 of the farmer watering his little field of barley. The well had just been dug over eight feet deep, expressly and solely to water this one piece of grain once, after which it would be filled and the ground planted. The season had been unusually dry, as had been the one before, and the people were fearing famine. Only 2.44 inches of rain had fallen at Tsingtao between the end of the preceding October and our visit, May 21st, and hundreds of such temporary wells had been or were being dug all along both sides of the two hundred and fifty miles of railway, and nearly all to be filled when the crop on the ground was irrigated, to release the land for one to follow. The homes are in villages a mile or more apart and often the holdings or rentals are scattered, separated by considerable distances, hence easy portability is the key-note in the construction of this irrigating outfit. The bucket is very light, simply a woven basket waterproofed with a paste of bean flour. The windlass turns like a long spool on a single pin and the standard is a tripod with removable legs. Some wells we saw were sixteen or twenty feet deep and in these the water was raised by a cow walking straight away at the end of a rope. The amount and distribution of rainfall in this province, as indicated by the mean of ten years' records at Tsingtao, obtained at the German Meteorological Observatory through the courtesy of Dr. B. Meyermanns, are given in the table in which the rainfall of Madison, Wisconsin, is inserted for comparison. Mean monthly rainfall. Mean rainfall In 10 days. Tsingtao, Madison, Tsingtao, Madison, Inches. Inches. Inches. Inches. January .394 1.56 .131 .520 February .240 1.50 .080 .500 March .892 2.12 .297 .707 April 1.240 2.62 .413 .840 May 1.636 3.62 .545 1.207 June 2.702 4.10 .901 1.866 July 6.637 3.90 2.212 1.300 August 5.157 3.21 1.719 1.070 September 2.448 3.15 .816 1.050 October 2.258 2.42 .753 .807 November .398 1.78 .132 .593 December .682 1.77 .227 .590 ------------ Total 24.682 31.65