While the people get their animal food in these ways, its preparation takes away the least possible amount of cultivated soil. The space occupied for roads and pleasure-grounds is insignificant, but there is perhaps an amount appropriated for burial places quite equal to the area used for those purposes in European countries; it is, however, less valuable land, and much of it would be useless for culture, even if otherwise unoccupied. Graves are dug on hills, in ravines and copses, and wherever they will be retired and dry; or if in the ancestral field, they do not hinder the crop growing close around them. Moreover, it is very common to preserve the coffin in temples and cemeteries until it is decayed, partly in order to save the expense of a grave, and partly to worship the remains, or preserve them until gathered to their fathers, in their distant native places. They are often placed in the corners of the fields, or under precipices where they remain till dust returns to dust, and bones and wood both moulder away. These and other customs limit the consumption of land for graves much more than would be supposed, when one sees, as at Macao, almost as much space taken up by the dead for a grave as by the living for a hut. The necropolis of Canton occupies the hills north of the city, of which not one-fiftieth part could ever have been used for agriculture, but where cattle are allowed to graze, as much as if there were no tombs. Under its genial and equable climate, more than three-fourths of the area of China Proper produces two crops annually. In Kwangtung, Kwangsí, and Fuhkien, two crops of rice are taken year after year from the low lands; while in the loess regions of the northwest, a three-fold return from the grain fields is annually looked for, if the rain-fall is not withheld. In the winter season, in the neighborhood of towns, a third crop of sweet potatoes, cabbages, turnips, or some other vegetable is grown. De Guignes estimates the returns of a rice crop at ten for one, which, with the vegetables, will give full twenty-five fold from an acre in a year; few parts, however, yield this increase. Little or no land lies fallow, for constant manuring and turning of the soil prevents the necessity of repose. The diligence exhibited in collecting and applying manure is well known, and if all this industry result in the production of two crops instead of one, it really doubles the area under cultivation, when its superficies are compared with those of other countries. If the amount of land which produces two crops be estimated at one-fourth of the whole (and it is perhaps as near one-third), the area of arable land in the provinces may be considered as representing a total of 812 millions of acres, or 2-3/4 acres to an individual. The land is not, however, cut up into such small farms as to prevent its being managed as well as the people know how to stock and cultivate it; manual labor is the chief dependence of