the farmer, fewer cattle, carts, ploughs, and machines being employed than in other countries. In rice fields no animals are used after the wet land has received the shoots, transplanting, weeding, and reaping being done by men. In no other country besides Japan is so much food derived from the water. Not only are the coasts, estuaries, rivers, and lakes, covered with fishing-boats of various sizes, which are provided with everything fitted for the capture of whatever lives in the waters, but the spawn of fish is collected and reared. Rice fields are often converted into pools in the winter season, and stocked with fish; and the tanks dug for irrigation usually contain fish. By all these means, an immense supply of food is obtained at a cheap rate, which is eaten fresh or preserved with or without salt, and sent over the Empire, at a cost which places it within the reach of all above beggary. Other articles of food, both animal and vegetable, such as dogs, game, worms, spring greens, tripang, leaves, etc., do indeed compose part of their meals, but it is comparatively an inconsiderable fraction, and need not enter into the calculation. Enough has been stated to show that the land is abundantly able to support the population ascribed to it, even with all the drawbacks known to exist; and that, taking the highest estimate to be true, and considering the mode of living, the average population on a square mile in China is less than in several European countries. ~TENDENCIES TO INCREASE OF POPULATION.~ The political and social causes which tend to multiply the inhabitants are numerous and powerful. The failure of male posterity to continue the succession of the family, and worship at the tombs of parents, is considered by all classes as one of the most afflictive misfortunes of life; the laws allow unlimited facilities of adoption, and secure the rights of those taken into the family in this way. The custom of betrothing children, and the obligation society imposes upon the youth when arrived at maturity, to fulfil the contracts entered into by their parents, acts favorably to the establishment of families and the nurture of children, and restricts polygamy. Parents desire children for a support in old age, as there is no legal or benevolent provision for aged poverty, and public opinion stigmatizes the man who allows his aged or infirm parents to suffer when he can help them. The law requires the owners of domestic slaves to provide husbands for their females, and prohibits the involuntary or forcible separation of husband and wife, or parents and children, when the latter are of tender age. All these causes and influences tend to increase population, and equalize the consumption and use of property more, perhaps, than in any other land.