open sea and to save as much silt as possible for the purpose of reclamation of land. The Middle Channel provides three ready receptacles for the deposit of the silt for the formation of new land: the Haimen, the Tsungming, and the Tungsha Banks. Besides these banks there are many hundreds of square miles of shallow bottom which in the course of ten or twenty years. will also form land. As remuneration is our first principle we must consider it in every step of our progress. The reclamation of about a thousand square miles of land even in forty not to say twenty years would be ample profit. At the lowest estimate the reclaimed land would be worth twenty dollars per mow. If after ten years five hundred square miles would be ready for cultivation purposes then we would gain a profit of 38,000,000 dollars. Whereas to make an approach by the South Channel the receptacle ground will be on one side only, that is, the Tungsha Banks, while on the right of the approach is the deep Hangchow Bay which would take hundreds of years to fill up, and in the meanwhile half of the silt would be wasted. To Shanghai as a seaport the silt is a curse but to the shallow banks the silt would be a blessing.
Since it is a profitable undertaking to reclaim the above mentioned banks and the neighboring shallows, we can quite well afford to build a double stone wall from the shore end of the Yangtze right out into the deep sea far beyond Shaweishan Island which is a distance of about forty miles. A stone wall from one fathom to five fathoms in height at low-water level
