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76 outruns their reason, as the components of a prodigious market for British goods, are not unlikely to continue in the future, as in the past, to adequately supply their own demand.

From Wan Hsien to Ch'ung-k'ing proved a somewhat monotonous journey of ten days, through scenery that varied little in character and presented the same features—red hills terraced for cultivation, bamboos, banyans, wood oil-trees, sugar-cane, and vegetables—throughout. Here and there where outcrops of coal were visible in the hillsides, crude openings like the burrowings of brobdingnagian rabbits were to be seen, calling to mind the extraordinary antiquity of the practice of burning coal in China,—a practice which excited the interest and the admiration of Marco Polo, who informed his astonished readers on his return to Europe that "all over the country of Cathay there is a kind of black stones existing in beds in the mountains which they dig out and burn like firewood; ... and they make such capital fuel that no other is used throughout the country." Examples of the primitive, however, become monotonous in China, and it was