"The wife may be divorced for ing, , , , to her husband's parents, and thieving; but all these causes are null when her parents are not alive to receive her back again. A man cannot have more than one wife, but he may take s, whose children are legally subject to the authority of the wife, as 's were to . Public opinion does not however justify the taking of a concubine except when the wife has borne no sons. In regions where the people are very poor, it is uncommon for a man to have more than one wife. A husband may beat his wife to death, and go unpunished ; but a wife who strikes her husband a single blow may be divorced, and beaten a hundred blows with the heavy bamboo. As long as a woman is childless, she serves; as soon as she becomes a mother, she begins to rule, and her dominion increases perpetually with the number of her descendants and the diminution of her elders. Married at fifteen, she is often a great-grandmother at sixty, and is the head of a household of some dozens of persons. So greatly does the welfare of the wife depend on her having sons, that it is not strange that they are her greatest desire, and her chief pride. For them she will sacrifice all else. Her daughters leave her and become legally and truly an integral part of another family forever. For domestic service, care in sickness, help in old age, and offerings for the sustenance of her spirit after death, she must rely on her son's wife, while her own daughter performs these services for someone else. The prosperity of a Chinese household is in proportion to the number of its sons."

"In the region probably nine tenths of the men are engaged in agriculture. The farmers live in villages, isolated dwellings being uncommon. The villages are walled, contain no wasted space, and are densely peopled. The wide-spreading, flat fields, lying along the river-banks at the foot of the hills, may be made to yield a constant series of crops without interval on account of winter. Their chief productions are rice, , es, , garden vegetables, s, , , , the , tobacco, and wheat. Rice is the staple food of the people, and in the best years the local product just supplies the local demand. is the principal export. The cane requires less labour than any other crop, and will grow upon unwatered land, which is unsuitable for rice-culture. One crop of cane or two crops of other produce may be grown in the same year upon unwatered land. On the best rice-fields three crops are sometimes raised. The early rice is sowed in April and harvested in July; the late rice is sowed in August and harvested in November, and the field is then sometimes planted with garden vegetables, which are pulled in March. The expense of fertilizing the third crop is so nearly equal to its value that it is never reckoned as a source of profit to the cultivator."

"Worker ants deprived of the sometimes run with great speed, continue to care for the young in the , fight with aliens of their own or other species, and they may for some days behave as if unconscious of loss. A Stenamma fulvum deprived of her abdomen lived thereafter for fourteen days in one of my artificial nests, and was seen to eat. A ‘’’’ worker lived without her abdomen for five days. M. mentions ... an ant that lived nineteen days after decapitation. In experiments made by me, headless ants have continued to walk about for many days."

"Miss Fielde has devised a very useful glass-nest, which is compact and light and has many advantages over the nests of the and patterns."