Of their birds, we briefly remark that there is but little difference between those in Japan and in America. The quail and pheasant and the wild and domestic duck and the reed-bird are the bird game for food, the stork being the national bird, and consecrated by their poets in song and by their painters and sculptors on canvas and in bronze.

The fishes of Japan contribute the principal and almost only meat food of the Empire, and their infinite variety and excellence are inexhaustible in supply. Often in American waters, inland or in the bays of the sea, by depredation. and poaching, as in the seal fishing, the fresh water fish as well as the shad and salmon and mackerel and cod, become seriously diminished in supply. Not so in Japan. To their scientific classification we make no pretense. The "Isaac Waltons" who have luck and leisure and gold, can in twelve days, by

steamer from San Francisco or from Vancouver, enjoy the finest fishing ground in the world. The game salmon of Yeddo surpass our own of Oregon, and their "Tye" of the bays of Nippon are gamer and more delicate to the palate than the famous speckled trout of the Adirondacks. Unfortunately, the shell fish of Japan, like those on the Pacific slope, are useless, being copperish in taste and unfit for the table.

A country with such a population, vastly disproportioned to its territory to support, calls for constant fertilization and preservation of its soil as an absolute necessity. For thousands of years, so their traditions run, every foot of land from the lowlands by the sea, or on her inland waters, or at the summit or sides of her mountains where a tree can be planted or a vine be made to grow, by artificial earth and culture, has been utilized by constant daily

application of every character of fertilizer and phosphites, and the cities and towns and country folk residences are forced by law to send every particle of decayed vegetable matter or animal or human excrement, in covered boats in earthen vessels on the canals or rivers or in carts drawn by the native coolies or by the Indian buffalo oxen, down to the rice-fields by the sea or inland waters, to the tea and silk fields, to the orchards and vineyards, and the incomparable vegetable gardens, where with deft hands every day of the whole year the lands are enriched and preserved beyond that of any other part of the known world. Hence, the Medical Faculty in Japan tell us that this necessary observance of hygiene and the laws of health among their forty millions of people gives to them a 25 per centum less death rate than in European or American States, except only the northern nations of Europe. It is a

fortunate fact that frost or snow, in latitude 35 degrees down to the farthest southern limit of 24 degrees, not more than once in fifteen or twenty years blights or blasts the ripening fruits or crops or flowers of the Empire.

The Christian world, while accepting the theory of the Savants and chemists, that this comparative exemption from vegetable death before its time is due to the peculiar character of that atmosphere, and the volcanic winds blowing landward from the sea, is inclined to assert right reverently that a merciful Providence has had more to do with the exemption than the theories of the chemists.

Admitting both to be true, in whole or in part, we found, whatever its cause, that not a suggestion even of fragrance was possessed by any fruit or flower in all Japan; not even the imported jassamine or the "sweet-scented shrubs" of the wild-wood of our boyhood in

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