(Notes and Queries.)
It has perhaps never occurred to persons visiting the lower valley of the Yangtze, to enquire from whence the once densely populated towns and villages, situated along its banks, obtained their fuel, since the hills produce no' wood, and though they contain coal, as well as other hidden treasures, it is an.article little known and never used in the native cuisine. Probably the traveller little thought, as he gazed from the steamer's deck on the low marshy banks of the Yangtze, between Shanghai and Anking, " distance of 305 miles, that it is from this source that inhabitants obtain their supply of fuel. These swampy plains and. Jow islands which intersect the course of the river, are, relatively speaking, the coal mines of Kiang-sri; in fact they are to the people of the lower Yangtze what coal is to an unwooded country. The immense reads grown along the banks of the Great River are of two kinds, one called the Lu and the other the 7% the former said to grow towards the mouth of the river,—Nanking and Chinkiang,—the latter higher up in the vicinity of An-King, where there is a river known as the Ti-kiang, after the reeds produced along its banks, Outwardly there is little difference in the appearance of these reeds; the chief distinction is that the Lu are hollow, pi lo. Though always much used as annual consumption took place. in former times in damming the banks of that must uncontrollable of rivers the Mang-ho, Persons who may not have witn: the ruinous state into which the present race have allowed the noble works of their an-cesters to fall, would doubtless imagine on, heating of the endless expense incurred over the embankments of the Yellow River and Grand Canal, that costly ma-soury was erected to keep the waters within their proper limits; but if my native informant is correct, little stone work was ever used. The Lu-chai (reeds) were substituted for more durable material by laying large sheaves of these reeds (often 20 feet long) horizontally with layers of earth and gravel between, in.a frauiework of piles, by which means the breaches made by the Committee." This, we believe, means that they freshets and age were filled up, and the banks protects
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.