With it, if he is a poor man and has no oxen to plough the ground, he turns up the soil where he is going to plant his crops, and with it he deftly, and with a turn of his wrist, levels out the surface so that it is made ready for the seed. With a broad-bladed hoe he dips to the bottom of a stream or of a pond, and he draws up the soft mud that had gathered there, and with a dexterous swing he flings the dripping hoeful on to his field near by to increase its richness by this new deposit. The stump of a tree will send out its roots wandering for moisture underneath a choice little plot where his potatoes are growing, and the farmer feels that these are an infringement upon the rights of the plants that look to him for protection. He seizes his hoe, and with a few sturdy strokes of its keen, sharp edge driven into its very heart in a short time the stump has vanished, and the roots have ceased tapping the moisture that the potato tubers require for their own growth. But it would take up too much space to describe all the thousand and one ways in which this truly national implement is used by the farmers of China. It is quite enough to say that without it they would be left quite helpless, and if the agriculture of the country was to be carried on, some other implement equally serviceable would have to be devised to take its place. The plough and the harrow are of secondary importance to the hoe, but still they occupy a prominent position in the agricultural economy of the nation. They are of course antiquated, for they have come down from the remote past untouched by any inventive genius during the long centuries that have elapsed since they were devised in the early dawn of Chinese history. To alter them, or even to make a suggestion that they could be improved in any way, would be such a monstrous heresy that the nation's hair would turn grey, and would cause the spirits of their ancestors such misery and shame that there is no knowing what calamities they might send upon the Empire to avenge their wrongs. The ability of the farmer in this country is measured by the crops he is able to produce. China is an old country, and for countless generations the teeming populations have had to get their living out of the land. There is no rest given it, for one rarely sees any of the fields being allowed to lie fallow in order to give them time for recuperation. The pressure of the hungry mouths is upon it, and to satisfy the needs of the people they must go on indefinitely producing sustenance for them. It is here where the genius of the Chinese farmer comes in. If hungry stomachs can only be satisfied by a supply of food, so the impoverished, famished land can be made to bear the strain upon its resources by putting into it a liberal supply of manures.