CONCLUSION 305 



knowledge of all the practices in the art of 

 agriculture which have enabled older nations 

 to meet growing demands of hunger. If 

 science should stand still, in fact, if the science 

 of agriculture should be expunged, still there 

 exist traditions which give the secret of feed- 

 ing ten or twenty times as many people to 

 the square mile as we are feeding to-day. 

 We are coming to look to the people of the 

 Far East more and more, and in time it will 

 become a national function to study these 

 people and set forth their precepts and ex- 

 amples for the benefit of our Jeremiahs. 

 Only in recent years have we come to view 

 anxiously the vast quantities of silt carried to 

 the sea and irretrievably lost by our rivers. 

 We are told that 4,100 years ago Emperor 

 Yao appointed the Great Yu "superintendent 

 of the works" in China to conserve the waste 

 of flood, and he devised a system of canaliza- 

 tion and impounding the surplus water of 

 freshets, so that the erosion of mountains 

 might be used to build delta land at the lower 

 levels. King tells us that many of the cities 

 of China have been steadily moving away 

 from the seashore where they were originally 

 built by this conservation of the waste of 



