522 DISCUSSION: FORESTS, REskkvotRs, AND STREAM FLOW 
Mr. Chitten- shed is small, but it flows for upwards of 1000 miles through a region 
of what geologists term loess, a soft formation which is readily 
washed into the river by rain or blown in by the wind, and contributes 
to the river a quantity of sediment apparently far in excess of that which 
comes from the Bad Lands of the Missouri. The Great Plain of 
China, as it is called, extending for 800 miles up and down the coast 
and 500 miles into the interior, is the delta of this great river whose 
tawny flood has given its name to the sea into which it flows. The 
great burden of sediment which it carries is out of proportion to the 
volume of discharge, and its bed fills up like that of the Platte River, 
in Nebraska, and overflows readily into the surrounding country. 
Like all such streams, its immediate borders are higher than the 
ground farther back, and the water once out of the banks spreads over 
the country in all directions. Owing to the great density of population 
in the plain and the impossibility of finding high ground for refuge, 
escape from these floods is very difficult, and they are therefore enor- 
mously destructive of human life. It is this fact that makes the 
Hoang Ho such a problem to the inhabitants of the Great Plain and 
even to China herself. 
Now the habits of the Hoang Ho River have been the same from 
the very dawn of Chinese history. In the will of one of her great 
Emperors is the statement that it had been “from the remotest ages 
China’s sorrow.” Wex, in the treatise already alluded to, quotes at 
length from a voluminous Chinese work, in part translated into Ger- 
man in 1858, on the management of Chinese waterways, in which the 
diking of the Hoang Ho is traced back 2500 years, B. CO. The river 
has changed its outlet no fewer than eleven times in that period, and 
the evidence is conclusive that it has been essentially the same stream 
from the beginning. In the citation above referred to, no mention is 
made that its floods are worse than they used to be, or that they have 
been influenced by deforestation, if there has been any. Wex would 
not have omitted any such evidence if he had found it. He traces the 
growth of the levee system, by which the overflow of the Hoang Ho 
was kept under at least partial control. As a result: 
“The extensive lowlands, which this water once covered entirely 
or turned into swamps, have been completely drained, cultivated, and 
planted with mulberry trees, cotton, sugar cane, rice, and all sorts of 
ae now indisputably belong to the most cultivated and fertile 
ands. 
These agricultural developments were brought into existence with- 
out any reference to the forests on the water-shed of the Hoang Ho, 
and, if they are now undergoing an unfavorable change, it is not in any 
sense due to the absence of forests. That any such influence has 
changed or is changing the climate of Northern China is not for a 
moment to be admitted. That a course of civilization which has come 
