This report bears testimony to the activity of at least one Muhammadan missionary in the eighteenth century, and the growth of Islam, which the Jesuit missionaries [993] noted in the eighteenth century, was probably not so little connected with direct proselytism as some of them supposed. Du Halde, in one of the few passages he devotes to the Muhammadans in his great work, [994] attributes the increase in their numbers largely to their habit of purchasing children in times of famine. “The Mahometans have been settled for more than six hundred years in various provinces, where they live quite quietly, because they do not make any great efforts to spread their doctrines and gain proselytes, and because in former times they only increased in numbers by the alliances and marriages they contracted. But for several years past they have continued to make very considerable progress by means of their wealth. They buy up heathen children everywhere; and the parents, being often unable to provide them with food, have no scruples in selling them. During a famine that devastated the Province of Chantong, they bought more than 10,000 of them. They marry them, and either purchase or build for them separate quarters in a town, or even whole villages; gradually in several places they gain such influence that they do not let any one live among them who does not go to the mosque. By such means they have multiplied exceedingly during the last century.” Similarly, in the famine that devastated the province of Kwangtung in 1790, as many as ten thousand children are said to have been purchased by the Muhammadans from parents who, too poor to support them, were willing to part with them to save them from starvation; these were all brought up in the faith of Islam. [995] A Chinese Musalman, from Yunnan, named Sayyid Sulaymān, who visited Cairo in 1894 and was there interviewed by the representative of an Arabic journal, [996] declared that the number of accessions to Islam gained in this way every year was beyond counting. Similar testimony is given by M. d’Ollone, who reports that this practice of buying children in times of famine prevails among the Muhammadans throughout the whole of China to the present day; in the same way, they purchased the children of Christian parents who were massacred by the Boxers in 1900, and brought them up as Musalmans. [997]