The population proves to be even greater than was supposed, for while 400,000,000 was formerly believed to be a maximum estimate, the general census recently taken by the Chinese Government for the purpose of assessing the war tax places the population of the Empire at 426,000,000. This, however, includes 8,500,000 in Manchuria, 2,580,000 in Mongolia, 6,430,020 in Tibet and 1,200,000 in Chinese Turkestan. Some of these regions are only nominally Chinese. Those on the western frontier were until comparatively recent years almost as unknown as the poles. Sven Hedin's description of those that he traversed is wonderfully fascinating. Only a daring spirit, the explorer of the type that is born, not made, could have pierced those vast solitudes and wrested from them the secret of their existence. That Hedin had no money for such a costly quest could not deter this Viking of the Northland. Kings headed the subscription and others so eagerly followed that ample funds were soon in hand. Princes helped with equipment and counsel. The Czar made all Russian railways free highways, and every local official and nomad chieftain exerted himself to aid the expedition. Hedin does not claim to give anything more than an ordered diary of his travels, together with a description of the lands he explored and the peoples he found. But what a diary it is! It takes the reader away from the whirl of crowded cities and clanging trolley-cars into the boundless, wind-swept desert and the solitude of majestic mountains where the lonely traveller wanders with his camels through untrodden wildernesses or floats down the interminable stretches of unknown rivers, while night after night he sleeps in his tiny tent or under the open sky. The author failed to reach the long-sought Lassa, the suspicious Dalai Lama refusing to be deceived or cajoled and sternly sending the inquisitive traveller out of the country. But the expedition of three years and three days was rich in other disclosures of ruined cities and great watercourses and lofty plateaus and majestic mountain ranges. The population is sparse in those desolate wastes, and the scattered inhabitants are wild and uncouth and free. Manchuria, however, is far from being the barren country that so many imagine it to be. It is, in many respects, like Canada, a region embracing about 370,000 square miles and of almost boundless agricultural and mineral wealth. The population, save in the southern parts, is not yet dense but it is rapidly increasing. But in central and eastern China, the conditions are very different. Here the population can only be indicated by a figure so large that it is almost impossible for us to comprehend it. Consider that the eighteen provinces alone, with an area about equal to that part of the United States east of the Mississippi River, have eight times the population of that part of our country.