The chicken of Chita must be counted as one of the greatest mysteries of a peculiarly mysterious country. Last year China exported 432,314 piculs of egg albumen and yolk, which would account for a vast number of eggs and therefore many hundreds of thousands of chickens to lay them. The country also exported 1,181,980,000 fresh and preserved eggs and 276,097 piculs of frozen eggs, and even if the chickens of China were as prolific layers as some of our Western strains, which they most certain-are not, millions would be required to produce so many_ eggs. To these scarcely believable millions there must be added yet more uncountable' hundreds of thousands whose lives ara sacrificed to keep chicken on about eight out of every ten menus in every house in China where the cook is allowed to order supplies on his own initiative. Having arrived at the point where one has proved that every year there must be billions ed chickens in China, and knowing that all chickens have some feathers—though the individual pieces of covering on many of them very easily can be counted ~zthere is cause for wonder as to what becomes of the feathers. Feathers are a very valuable article of trade and they are in constant demand for Europe and America, © especially the former. Yet for a very long time past exporters have had to cable in answer to inquiries, "Supplies exhausted: none now available." It is hard to imagine a Chinese wasting anything that is sale able, particularly when it can he disposed of quickly at a highly remunerative figure, but somehow or other the supplies of feathers coming into the market do not seem in any way to correspond with the numbers of chickens that must. cease to exist every year in order to allow scratching room for those still working to provide maintenance for exporters,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.