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The 39th parallel of latitude lies just south of Tientsin; followed westward, it crosses the toe of Italy's boot, leads past Lisbon in Portugal, near Washington and St. Louis and to the north of Sacramento on the Pacific. We were leaving a country with a mean July temperature of 80° F., and of 21° in January, but where two feet of ice may form; a country where the eighteen year mean maximum temperature is 103.5° and the mean minimum 4.5°; where twice in this period the thermometer recorded 113° above zero, and twice 7° below, and yet near the coast and in the latitude of Washington; a country where the mean annual rainfall is 19.72 inches and all but 3.37 inches falls in June, July, August and September. We had taken the 5:40 A. M. Imperial North-China train, June 17th, to go as far northward as Chicago,—to Mukden in Manchuria, a distance by rail of some four hundred miles, but all of the way still across the northward extension of the great Chinese coastal plain. Southward, out from the coldest quarter of the globe, where the mean January temperature is more than 40° below zero, sweep northerly winds which bring to Mukden a mean January temperature only 3° above zero, and yet there the July temperature averages as high as 77° and there is a mean annual rainfall of but 18.5 inches, coming mostly in the summer, as at Tientsin.

Although the rainfall of the northern extension of China's coastal plain is small, its efficiency is relatively