The tables in this book are arranged apparently for the worker on the spot as well as for the intelligent supporter and director at home; why multiply tables and trouble the missionary with the sums of proportion?
Why not ask the man there simply to give the necessary facts and then let the man at home work out for special purposes the various relations?
The answer is simple: we ourselves have been asked to fill up long schedules of unrelated facts; and we know that the labour is intolerable.

The supply of unrelated, meaningless facts dulls and wearies the brain.

Few men can do the work with pleasure or profit, and consequently the schedules are often filled up, not indeed with deliberate carelessness, but with that heavy painfulness which, taking no interest in the work, often produces as pitiful a result as downright carelessness.

"Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn" is a maxim which has a great application here.

The man who provides the information should be the first to profit by it and to be interested in it.