

MarcH 25, 1915 | 
NATURE gl 

involved. During a sojourn of more than thirty 
years in China he had taken a keen interest in 
all the economic resources of the empire; he had, 
moreover, been one of the members of the 
International Opium Commission which met at 
Shanghai. The narrative and the results of the 
two official journeys, undertaken with the object 
of securing the information of which the British 
Government had need, are given in the volumes 
now before us. 
As the author in his preface explains, the book 
is not devoted to the history of the opium ques- 
tion. Nevertheless, those interested in 
question will do well to consult this work. 
circumstance that such consultants may neither 
be inclined nor qualified to appreciate the whole 
of the contents has been forestalled by the pro- | 
vision, for their especial benefit, of a couple of 
appendices wherein the genesis of the anti-opium 
crusade is outlined, and the results of his own 
investigations of 1910~11 into the cultivation of 
the poppy are summarised. 

Fic. 1.—The lo-ss formation, with mule litter and passenger cart, Shansi. From “On the 
Trail of the Opium Poppy.” 
As compared with various other accounts of | 
recent Chinese travel, an outstanding feature of 
the present work is the extent to which it deals 
with the conditions and the appearance of long- 
settled and closely cultivated portions of that 
empire. Having regard to the primary purpose 
of his two journeys this was inevitable, nor can 
the reader be too grateful to the author for the 
care and precision with which he recapitulates 
the various crops observed in the course of a par- 
ticular stage. Even in districts where tilth is 
most intensive, however, areas occur which are 
unfit for cultivation, and are under timber. The 
components of the vegetation in cases of this kind 
are as carefully assessed as the field crops. In 
one such passage the author warns the reader 
not to assume, because reference has been made 
almost exclusively to trees of economic import- 
ance, that species of less consequence were 
altogether absent. The same may be true of 
other stages, as to which no such reservation is 
No. 2369, VOL. 95 | 
that | 
The | 

made. But even when due allowance is made fcr 
this possibility, one of the most interesting im- 
pressions which the narrative of the author con- 
veys is the extent to which species that are devoid 
of utilitarian interest and value have become 
eliminated. The naturally regenerated constitu- 
ents of the woodlands on uncultivated mountain 
slopes appear in the main to be as. strictly 
economic as the species planted along highways 
and irrigation channels. , 
The detailed descriptions of the various stages 
should render the work useful to those who may 
follow the author’s route, but the general reader 
will be most interested in, and will profit most 
from, the incidental accounts of the configuration, 
the industries, and the polity of the provinces 
traversed by him. A passage which excites 
interest and arrests attention deals with the 
famous Nestorian tablet at Hsi-an Fu in Shensi, 
while the temperate but convincing reference to 
the shortcomings of European cartography, the 
uniformity and simplicity of Chinese delimita- 


Fic. 2.—Chinese ash (/va+inus Chinensts) 
coated with insect white wax. From 
“On the Trail of the Opium Poppy.” 
tions and terminology notwithstanding, evokes 
the reader’s sympathy. Space forbids more than 
a passing reference to a few of the interesting 
topics discussed in the work. Among these may 
be mentioned the cultivation of huskless grain, 
the use of the fibres quaintly known to European 
commerce as China jute and China grass, the 
preparation of varnish, the weaving of silk, the 
making of bamboo hats, the wood-oil industry, 
the smelting of copper, the mining of coal, the 
separation of salt, the planting of rice, the various 
contrivances for irrigation, the different types of 
bridges. With these and other equally interest- 
ing topics the reader may best be left to make 
himself acquainted by reading. the book. One 
of the most interesting passages in the work deals 
with the familiar yet little understood loess forma- 
tion (Fig. 1), so extensively represented in the 
area traversed during the author’s northern 
journey. Another, taken from the southern 
journey, treats of the white-wax industry (Fig. 2), 
