China's population figures: can the contradictions be resolved?
In recent years, the government of the People's Republic of China has been reporting the country's population as "nearly 800 million." A variety of evidence suggests that this approximation is the best currently available in China, and that it may be some time before further, more accurate, demographic data are produced. The paper presents and discusses alternate population estimates and projections by UN, US, and USSR specialists.
The size, composition, and growth of the population of mainland China
Dr. Levy's translation of the biography of An Lu-shan in the Old T'ang History is soberly done. It is provided with a judicious, though not especially penetrating, introduction and a useful map. One's doubts are primarily concerned with the limits of the Chinese Hehchuan form and the usefulness (except as a linguistic exercise) of translating examples of it as an end in itself rather than as a part of some larger study. Ueh-chuan are not, and were never intended to be, biographies in the sense of rounded accounts of men's lives. As narratives of events they are unsatisfactory because they have to be fitted together with what appears in other parts of the histories. They are a mine of raw material to be quarried, sifted, compared with what is found elsewhere. One's aim must be to get behind them, not to present them "objectively."
New Strain Meters for Geophysics
IN the past two months, three ultra long period linear strain meters have been successfully operated in the United Kingdom. Their design is novel and of interest because of the growing attention being paid to long period seismology and the study of earth tides. Here we briefly describe the three, display the first records obtained from them and outline what we may expect to use them for in the future.