?6 
Well, I just received your yevy sympathetic 
letter of February ?6 (which was opened "by the 
censor) and I see hov; this lorlg drawing war is 
effecting things slowly but surely. Yes, Mr. 
Falrchild, it often seems that we do not live 
ourselves any longer but that we are being lived . 
Uncontrollable forces seem to be at work among 
humanity and final results, or possibly purposes, 
are not being revealed as yet, that is, for so far 
as I can look into this v/hole titanic cataclysm. 
Now concerning my own plans of which you 
want an outline by about the 1st of July, well, 
I can say this, that my ideas are to leave here 
within a day or tv/o , visit Kiukiang for tun^il 
plantations which have been set out nearby, then 
go down to Nanking possibly and from there to 
Shanghai, where I may stay many weeks shipping 
off seeds and specimens. Then when the heat gets 
too intense I may move up to some quiet place on 
the coast of Shantung and work up the herbariiwi 
specimens I have collected these past 18 months. 
When chestnuts commence to come in by the end of 
September or early October I may purchase several 
hundreds of pounds and ship them and possibly 
seeds of Pyrus ussuriensis might be brought to us, 
unless Prof. Heimer comes out again, as he had 
intentions to do; in this last csise I shall not 
intrude into his special field. 
Concerning exploration work in Southern and 
\7estern China, well, prospects for the present 
are far from bright. A gentleman who just re- 
turned from a several weeks' trip into Fookien 
Prov. informed me yesterday that brigandage is so 
rife there that in whole districts the ordinary 
farmers have given up planting rice and are join- 
ing robber bands. And you know of course from 
nev/spaper items that Americans have been kid- 
napped by bandits in Honan and Shantung and mis- 
sionaries have been killed, injured or molested 
in Shansi, Szechuan, Honan and Fookien. The out- 
look therefore of interior exploration is de- 
cidedly gloomy. --Of course Japan is hard at v/ork 
trying to bring stableness out of chaos, but -- 
whether her ideal of tranquillity here in China 
agrees v/ith that of the peopl,e themselves, "voila 
la question", as our French confreres would say. 
So I am very sorry to have to state, we are 
not able to make fixed plans until political con- 
ditions take a turn for the better. 
September 21, ,1918. 
