however, all cultivated lands, including adjacent hill and mountain
sides, the canals, streams and the sea have been made to contribute
what they could toward the fertilization of cultivated fields and
these contributions in the aggregate have been large. In China, in
Korea and in Japan all but the inaccessible portions of their vast
extent of mountain and hill lands have long been taxed to their full
capacity for fuel, lumber and herbage for green manure and compost
material; and the ash of practically all of the fuel and of all of
the lumber used at home finds its way ultimately to the fields as
fertilizer.

In China enormous quantities of canal mud are applied to the fields,
sometimes at the rate of even 70 and more tons per acre. So, too,
where there are no canals, both soil and subsoil are carried into
the villages and there between the intervals when needed they are,
at the expense of great labor, composted with organic refuse and
often afterwards dried and pulverized before being carried back and
used on the fields as home-made fertilizers. Manure of all kinds,
human and animal, is religiously saved and applied to the fields in
a manner which secures an efficiency far above our own practices.
Statistics obtained through the Bureau of Agriculture, Japan, place
the amount of human waste in that country in 1908 at 23,950,295
tons, or 1.75 tons per acre of her cultivated land. The
International Concession of the city of Shanghai, in 1908, sold to a
Chinese contractor the privilege of entering residences and public
places early in the morning of each day in the year and removing the
night soil, receiving therefor more than $31,000, gold, for 78,000
tons of waste. All of this we not only throw away but expend much
larger sums in doing so.