142 TRACTS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS, &c. 



other culinary plants, are produced upon them. A reservoir is 

 sunk in the top of the mountain. The rain water collected in 

 it, is conveyed by channels successively to the different terraces 

 placed upon the mountain's sides. In spots too rugged, barren, 

 steep, or high for raising other plants, the camellia sesanqua, 

 and divers firs, particularly the larch, are cultivated with 

 success. 



" The collection of manure is an object of so much attention 

 with the Chinese, that a prodigious number of old men and 

 women, as well as of children, incapable of much other labour, 

 are constantly employed about the streets, public roads, banks of 

 canals and rivers, with baskets tied before them, and holding in 

 their hands small wooden rakes to pick up the dung of animals, 

 and offals of any kind that may answer the purpose of manure ; 

 but above every other, except the dung of fowls, the Chinese 

 farmers, like the Romans, according to the testimony of Columella, 

 prefer soil, or that matter which is collected by nightmen in 

 London, in the vicinity of which, it is, in fact, applied to the same 

 uses ; as has already been alluded to in describing a visit to the 

 Lo-wang peasant, in a former part of this work. This maniue is 

 mixed sparingly with a portion of stiff loamy earth, and formed 

 into cakes, dried afterwards in the sun. In this state it sometimes 

 becomes an object of commerce, and is sold to farmers, who 

 never employ it in a compact state. Their first care is to con- 

 struct large cisterns for containing, besides those cakes and dung 

 of every kind, all sorts of vegetable matter, as leaves, or ro<ts, or 

 stems of plants, mud from the canals, and offals of animals, even 

 to the shavings collected by the barbers. With ail these they 

 mix as much animal water as can be collected, or of common 

 water, as will dilute the whole ; and in this state, generally in 

 the act of putrid fermentation, they apply it to the ploughed or 



