SIO M. Biot on Stonij Matter used for Food in China. 



wives, their sous and daughters, they then sold their tools, and the furniture 

 of their houses ; and even these they have finally demolished that they 

 might sell the timber-work. Many of these unfortunate people were really 

 rich four years ago." 



Another missionary, M. Rameaux,* writing concerning the province of 

 Hou-Kouang, about the middle of the year 1834, supplies details'_which are not 

 Jess deplorable. " The district Fan-Hien, he remarks, contained about a 

 thousand converts ; but their number has been exceedingly reduced by fa- 

 mine. A great number have come to me to demand the last sacraments. They 

 calculate their resources, and accurately know, almost to an hour, the num- 

 ber of days they can subsist. They receive the sacrament of extreme unction 

 ■when their means are exhausted, and then having nothing to eat, they calmly 

 wait the moment of their demise.'' 



Clearly to apprehend the cause of these calamities, and their frequent re- 

 turns among an industrious society, which is chiefly agricultural, and has had 

 the blessing of a steady government for a long course of ages, it is neces- 

 sary to recollect that many provinces of China, more extensive than the half 

 of the whole kingdom of France, are great uniform plains, traversed by im- 

 mense rivers, whose beds are ever and anon choked up by the deposits which 

 are left by the waters, so that it is necessary constantly to confine them by 

 high dikes, which are maintained with immense labour. The provinces of 

 Hou-Kouang and of Kiang-Si, for example, which have now been named, are 

 thus traversed by the Blue and other great rivers. These circumstances af- 

 ford every facilitv for irrigation, develope an agriculture in which industry is 

 pushed very nearly to its limit, whereby the most abundant harvests are pro- 

 duced, especially of rice, which is cultivated even up the slopes of the hills, 

 the water being forced up by hand-engines. So long as this state of things 

 continues, the necessary result is an immense production of the means of 

 subsistence, which leads to a corresponding development of the population. 

 But if once the waters so far increase as to run over the dikes, they spread 

 over the plain, inundate it, and swallow up a portion of the population : 

 whilst those who escape the disaster, finding themselves ruined, and deprived 

 of all their resources so long as the waters cover the soil, remain a prey to 

 all the miseries which the missionaries describe, and, finally, in immense 

 numbers, actually perish from hunger. This cause, conjoined with the awful 

 catastrophes produced by earthquakes, which seem to be more frequent, 

 more violent, and especially more widely spread in China than in most other 

 regions of the globe, enable us, in a great degree, to understand the sudden 

 vicissitudes which, as the history of China attests, so often occur in the num- 

 ber of the population of this vast empire ; vicissitudes whose proportionate 

 number bears no relation to the regular laws of European population, as may 

 be seen in a memoir inserted in the Journal de la Societe Asiaiique.f 



• Ann. de la propogatioa de la Foi, No. xlviii. p. 61. 



t Memoire sur la population de la Chine et ses Variations, depuit fan. 2400 avant 

 I'ere Chritienne, jusqii'au 13^ Siecle apres ; par Edouard Biot. 



