by the northern route, at one P. M. February second, reaching
Yokohama February 19th and Shanghai, March 1st. It was our aim
throughout the journey to keep in close contact with the field and
crop problems and to converse personally, through interpreters or
otherwise, with the farmers, gardeners and fruit growers themselves;
and we have taken pains in many cases to visit the same fields or
the same region two, three or more times at different intervals
during the season in order to observe different phases of the same
cultural or fertilization methods as these changed or varied with
the season.

Our first near view of Japan came in the early morning of February
19th when passing some three miles off the point where the Pacific
passenger steamer Dakota was beached and wrecked in broad daylight
without loss of life two years ago. The high rounded hills were
clothed neither in the dense dark forest green of Washington and
Vancouver, left sixteen days before, nor yet in the brilliant
emerald such as Ireland's hills in June fling in unparalleled
greeting to passengers surfeited with the dull grey of the rolling
ocean. This lack of strong forest growth and even of shrubs and
heavy herbage on hills covered with deep soil, neither cultivated
nor suffering from serious erosion, yet surrounded by favorable
climatic conditions, was our first great surprise.

To the southward around the point, after turning northward into the
deep bay, similar conditions prevailed, and at ten o'clock we stood
off Uraga where Commodore Perry anchored on July 8th, 1853, bearing
to the Shogun President Fillmore's letter which opened the doors of
Japan to the commerce of the world and, it is to be hoped brought to
her people, with their habits of frugality and industry so indelibly