104 Fortieth Annual Meeting 



Do you see it? — stretching away endlessly over river lines and lakes, 

 and the gentle undulations of the lowlands, and up the escarpments of 

 the higher hills; 



The innumerable patchwork of civilization — the verdure of the young 

 rice; the somber green of orange groves; the lines of tea shrubs, well 

 hoed, and showing the bare earth beneath; the pollard mulberries; the 

 plots of cotton and maize and wheat and yam and clover; 



The endless silver threads of irrigation canals and ditches, skirting 

 the hills for scores and hundreds of miles, tier above tier, and serpen- 

 tining down to the lower slopes and plains — 



The grand canal of the delta plain extending, a thronged waterway, 

 for seven hundred miles, with sails of junks and bankside villages 

 innumerable ; 



The chain pumps, worked by buffaloes or men, for throwing the 

 water up slopes and hillsides, from tier to tier, from channel to 

 channel ; 



The endless rills and cascades, flowing down again, into pockets and 

 hollows of verdure, and on fields of steep and plain ; 



A country of few roads, but of innumerable waterways. 



This vast population abides — the most productive in the world. 



And all are bound to the earth. 



Rendering back to it as a sacred duty every atom that the earth sup- 

 plies to them (not insensately sending it in sewers to the sea). 



By the way of abject common sense they have sought to found on 

 human soil their City Celestial ! 



But China is largely a deforested country, with much 

 of the cultivated land built up in terraces to which water 

 has to be laboriously pumped. We shall do better than 

 China, for we are already beginning to protect the forests 

 of our hills and mountains, and will thereby secure the 

 perpetual flow of streams, and the engineers of our 

 Reclamation Service have already issued volumes of 

 plans for the impounding of waters that shall flow down 

 plentifully through irrigation canals, upon the arid lands 

 below, until they become gardens and until thousands 

 of reservoirs yield a plentiful supply of fish food. 



We have not only disregarded our fresh waters in 

 most of these respects, but we have carelessly permitted 

 them to become polluted. The pollution of public waters 

 is our most common act and our most uncivilized 

 practice. The casting of refuse in a stream results only 

 in transferring it from one neighborhood to another. 



The great evil with which practical fish-culture in 



