136 Thirty-Third Annual Meeting 
and presented to the government for the purpose. Has any- 
thing of this kind ever happened in the United States ? 
An important business in parts of Japan, more especially 
in the south and on the shores of the beautiful Inland Sea, is 
the manufacture of salt from sea water. Many thousand persons 
are engaged, and the salt thus made is used in the fisheries and 
for most other purposes, there being very little rock salt em- 
ployed. The salt fields are on about the same level as the sea, 
and are intersected by ditches in which the tide flows. The sur- 
é 
'T pest ar 
eee 

A FISHERY EXPERIMENT STATION. 
face is hard, level and sandy. Water from the ditches is 
sprinkled by hand over the floor, and then, in order to promote 
evaporation, men rake the wet sand with a kind of harrow. The 
sprinkling and stirring of the sand continue until it can take up 
no more salt; it is then scraped into piles by means of long 
pieces of wood drawn by the workmen, and put into bins, of 
which each field has many arranged in long rows. ‘The sand is 
then thoroughly washed with sea water, and the concentrated 
brine resulting collects in vats beneath the bins. From the vats 
