Page:China- Its State and Prospects.djvu/56

34 Almost every individual met with, in the paths and fields, is provided with a basket and a rake; and every evening, the cottager brings home a certain quantity to add to the mest heap, which is a most important appendage to every dwelling. Having but few sheep and cattle, they are obliged to make the most of the stercoraceous stock of men and swine. This is carefully collected, and actually sold at so much per pound, while whole strings of city scavengers may be seen cheerily posting into the country, every successive morning, with their envied acquisitions; little heeding the olfactory nerves of the less interested passengers. Every other substance likely to answer the end, is anxiously collected, and carefully disposed, so as to provide for future exigencies; such as decayed animal and vegetable matter, the sweeping of streets, the mud of canals, burnt bones, lime; and, what is not a little singular, the short stumpy human hair, shaven from millions of heads, every ten days, is industriously gathered up, and sold for manure throughout the empire. In the high importance placed on stercoration, in China, we see an illustration of that passage in 2 Kings, vi. 25, that when there was a great famine in Samaria, "the fourth part of a cab of dove's dung was sold for five pieces of silver."

The skill of the Chinese husbandman is also manifested in the arrangement and irrigation of his rice lands. The centre and south of China rice is the staple commodity; and it is well known that rice will not thrive unless supplied with water. From the preparing of the ground for the seed, almost to the reaping of the harvest, the rice fields must be overspread with water. In order to this, each field is made perfectly level, with an