Ginger is another. crop which is very widely and extensively cultivated. It is generally displayed in the market in the root form. No one thing was more generally hawked about the streets of China than the water chestnut. This is a small corm or fleshy bulb having the shape and size of a small onion. Boys pare them and sell a dozen spitted together on slender sticks the length of a knitting needle. Then there are the water caltropes, grown in the canals producing a fruit resembling a horny nut having a shape which suggests for them the name "buffalo-horn". Still another plant, known as water-grass (Hydropyrum latifolium) is grown in Kiangsu province where the land is too wet for rice. The plant has a tender succulent crown of leaves and the peeling of the outer coarser ones away suggests the husking of an ear of green corn. The portion eaten is the central tender new growth, and when cooked forms a delicate savory dish. The farmers' selling price is three to four dollars, Mexican, per hundred catty, or $.97 to $1.29 per hundredweight, and the return per acre is from $13 to $20. The small number of animal products which are included in the market list given should not be taken as indicating the proportion of animal to vegetable foods in the dietaries of these people. It is nevertheless true that they are vegetarians to a far higher degree than are most western nations, and the high maintenance efficiency of the agriculture of China, Korea and Japan is in great measure rendered possible by the adoption of a diet so largely vegetarian. Hopkins, in his Soil Fertility and Permanent Agriculture, page 234, makes this pointed statement of fact: "1000 bushels of grain has at least five times as much food value and will support five times as many people as will the meat or milk that can be made from it". He also calls attention to the results of many Rothamsted feeding experiments with growing and fattening cattle, sheep and swine, showing that the cattle destroyed outright, in every 100 pounds of dry substance eaten, 57.3 pounds, this passing off into the air, as does all of wood except the ashes, when burned in the stove; they left in the excrements 36.5 pounds, and stored as increase but 6.2 pounds of the 100. With sheep the corresponding figures were 60.1 pounds; 31.9 pounds and 8 pounds; and with swine they were 65.7 pounds; 16.7 pounds and 17.6 pounds. But less than two-thirds of the substance stored in the animal can become food for man and hence we get but four pounds in one hundred of the dry substances eaten by cattle in the form of human food; but five pounds from the sheep and eleven pounds from swine.