and donkeys; 1.5 head of cattle; 11.1 pigs; and 6 domestic fowls. I believe these figures hold true with middlegrade farmers, but hardly with the general average when all the smaller ones are taken into the count.

MANCHURIAN AND MONGOLIAN PONIES

Mongolia and Manchuria are the original home of the ponies which are world-beaters in their power of endurance and their ability to survive on coarse and scanty feed. The near-World Empire of the great Kublai Khan was founded on the Mongolian pony. There is very little fable about this statement. It was the great Khan's cavalry, and not his infantry, which swept everything before it far beyond the Danube. It was mounted on the Mongolian pony. He is small; his low forelegs, high stern, and comparatively long trunk make him no prize-winner at a beauty show. But when the whole world is fast locked in ice and an arctic blizzard tunes up over a thousand-mile stretch of snowwhitened Manchurian and Mongolian steppes, his shaggy and stubborn form has all the appearances of a worldconqueror. The least tribute one can pay him is to say that he is the ancestor of practically all north-Asian horses.

The Manchurian horses come largely from the northeastern corner of Amur Province, from the Tsitsihar, Hailar, and Manchuli districts; but South Manchuria draws most of its stock from Eastern Inner Mongolia. The districts around Nungan and Changchun have long been famous for their native breed of horses, also. The statistical figures of Manchurian horses vary as vastly as any other figures about such things. A Chinese official estimate for 1918 puts the total number of horses for all China at 4,302,321, and for the Three Eastern Provinces, that is, Manchuria, at 2,190,231. A later figure

Matting bins, draught horses and oxen in the yard of a grain merchant at Kungchuling

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given out by the experts of the South Manchuria Railway is somewhat higher than that-2,500,000. Still later figures from a Russian investigator entitled to high consideration place the number of ponies in North Manchuria together with that section of Eastern Inner Mongolia along the border of Manchuria at no less than 3,500,000 head. These figures do not include the mules, which also are in great number in North Manchuria.

SHEEP

The whole of China is credited with 45,000,000 head of sheep, half of which is supposed to be in Manchuria and Mongolia. That is no small part of the total number of sheep in the world, which was placed before the war at about 600,000,000 head. It will not be difficult for our American readers to realize the magnitude of these figures when they remember that the total number of sheep in the United States is estimated at 37,209,000. In North Manchuria alone there are eleven millions of them, according to the Russian authority quoted above. The trading in these Manchurian sheep and their products centers about the towns of Manchuli and Hailar along the Chinese Eastern Railway. Every year about 200,000 head of sheep are supplied out of the Mongolian territory feeding the western section of the Chinese Eastern Railway. Out of that number about 100,000 head are consumed locally by the Chinese in that section of North Manchuria; about 65,000 head are exported to Russian Siberia; and 35,000 head are consumed by Europeans along the Chinese Eastern line.

Hailar and Manchuli are also the trade centers for cattle, of which there are some 5,000,000 head in North Manchuria. The Manchurian steer is an excellent meat animal both in the quantity it produces and in the quality of its beef. Pigs are raised in great number by Man

churian farmers everywhere, and the number in North Manchuria is estimated at 3,200,000. The annual increase of the livestock in North Manchuria, according to the Russian investigator, after deducting all losses from natural causes, amounts to the following:

No more than 10 per cent. of this increase is brought to the market, however.

The figures of livestock in Manchuria and Eastern Inner Mongolia for 1921, according to the investigation of the South Manchuria Railway Company's experts, together with current prices for them, are as follows:

The total number of domestic fowls is given at about 8,700,000.

DOGS

Dogs have a distinct and dignified economic status in Manchuria. This is due to the value of their skins. In Amur Province a girl's dowry is often made up of six