able extent, any more than the Thibetans or the Siamese, by the possession of this precious instrument of progress. The latter have, it is true, been reduced to intellectual childhood by Buddhism. In Corea, Buddhism is, as it is in China, at once official and despised, and the cause which has hitherto retained the country in a semi-barbarous condition must be sought in the influence of fear. The country is threatened at once by China and Japan, by Russia and by the Western Powers. This varied country, as large as the half of France, and peopled by at least eight millions of short broadshouldered men with a type of face like that of the Japanese, and by a bearded race with horizontal eyes and light skin (the Han, descendants of immigrants from Nan-Chang), opens its ports to other nations only under constraint. The Japanese have invaded it several times, notably in 1591, and exacted a tribute in which figured thirty human skins, and have recently established two trading ports on the south-east coast; the Chinese, who left it alone for sixteen centuries, deprived it in the seventeenth century, but only for a short time, of its north-western provinces; the French and the Americans have both made vain demonstrations at the mouth of the Hang-Kang, the river which waters Seoul, the capital. The Catholic and Protestant missions have made little way; their labours have availed at least to give us those geographical details from which Anville has traced the outlines of Corea, and some valuable information regarding the people, its customs, and government. A Corean-French dictionary, the work of a priest who escaped the massacre of 1866, a Corean grammar in French, published at Yokohama, the fine collection brought back by a traveller and exhibited in 1889 at the Trocadero, and,

lastly, the perseverance of the Japanese, the English, and the Russians, will sooner or later dissipate the obscurity which hangs over this nation, but may perhaps diminish the interest which is born of mystery and curiosity. Indeed, we know of the Corean people all that matters for our present purpose: the nominal power of an absolute king, the real power of the great chiefs who surround him with all the forms of a servile respect; the division of the nation into nobles, plebeians, and slaves; the sequestration of the married women; polygamy; the belief in genii and ancestor-worship; survivals of fire-worship; the rigour of mourning, which obliges a son to weep for his father three times a day at stated hours for three years, and to abstain for the same period from all public functions. None of these are uncommon customs, but two or three peculiarities deserve mention. The Coreans do not spin or weave wool; in winter they wear a greater amount of hempen and cotton clothing, and their soldiers wear cuirasses lined with many folds of similar material, which were proof against the bullets of old time; violet and olive green are the favourite colours, white and green being reserved for mourning.

A few more words are necessary about the language of the Kaokaiuli or Korai (of which we have made Coreans; it is the name of one of the northern provinces, but they prefer to give their country a name which recalls its situation between the empire of the centre and the land of the rising sun: Tchiaosien, the clearness of morning).

In grammatical structure, says the missionary Dallet, Corean somewhat resembles the Uralian and Tongouse idioms. The terminations of the verbs vary according to the sex and condition of the interlocutors. The

pronunciation is harsh and full of aspirates, drawling and indistinct; each phrase ends with a peculiar guttural difficult to reproduce. The liquid is not clearly heard. The vowels, fourteen in number, are uncertain and incline to be diphthongs. The written character consists of rather more than 200 signs, some syllabic, others alphabetical, but educated people disdain to use them. "The introduction of a number of foreign words, Chinese in the north, Japanese in the south, has given birth," says Elisée Reclus, "to various jargons which are widely spoken in the centres of commerce. Chinese is the official language. Just as in Europe in the Middle Ages, Latin, the language of the lettered, persisted side by side with the local idiom, so the written Chinese is maintained in Corea together with the language of the people; but it is pronounced in such fashion that the Chinese could not understand it without an interpreter. According to the missionary Daveluy, the language of many districts is composed entirely of Chinese words, but with Corean terminations. In brief, every place, every person, every thing has two names, one Corean, the other Coreanised Chinese, and these synonyms enter freely into the speech of all classes.' The vocabulary is mixed, not the structure; the agglutinative character is found even in the elements borrowed from the Chinese monosyllabism.

Over against the immobility of China and the mistrust of Corea we find a people eager for civilisation. No sooner had treaties, extorted by intimidation, opened five or six ports to Europeans, than this land, which from the sixteenth century violently opposed the foreigner, Japan, or rather Nippon, which massacred missionaries and forced the Dutch to spit upon

the cross, became suddenly enamoured of our ideas, of our law, of our science, and made a vigorous effort towards progress. A reforming government put an end to the feudal daimos, to the military usurpation of the Syogun or Taikoun, centralised the administration, caused a code of laws to be drawn up by French lawyers, projected railways, established schools everywhere, destroyed the Buddhist temples under pretext of restoring the ancient worship of genii, published newspapers, sent students to Paris, London, and Berlin, to learn our languages, our manners, and institutions. And recently we have learned that the Mikado, the son of the rising sun, the ancient and divine head of a theocracy, has summoned an elected parliament. It is possible to have diverse opinions as to the future of a change so radical and urged forward with such unusual haste. In any case, it commands attention and sympathy; it is not possible to look coldly on those who welcome us with open arms. But what is the history of this people, which seems to be ancient and which yet shows all the signs of a vigorous youth?

A complete answer to this question would take us altogether beyond our subject, but some attempt must be made. Japan was inhabited before the dawn of history; instruments of stone and of bone have been discovered in different parts of the Archipelago, in tumuli and kitchen-middens, mingled with the bones. of monkeys, bears, boars, and deer, and of other animals, some of which are now extinct. Human bones fractured and split longitudinally even seem to point to cannibalism. It is not known what this ancient race was, nor whether it is represented by Negritos, who transmitted their woolly hair to some of the southern groups of Kiu-siu, or by the Ainus

(Yebiss or Mao-tsin of the Chinese), a hairy race which certainly long occupied the great island of Nippon or Hondo. At a very early period an invasion from Corea, attacking Kiu-siu from the islands of Tsou-sima and Iki, drove back to the north-east the majority of the Ainus. These Coreans, the Kmaço or Ion-ço, appear to have been plebeians or country folk of the Mongoloid type: the face wide and lozenge-shaped, retreating forehead, eyes narrow and oblique, short nose, high cheek-bones, and yellow skin. Finally, towards the seventh century before our era, tradition speaks of the arrival of a legendary conqueror, Kaniou-Yamato-Vare-Bixo, and of a new race, the Yamatos, which furnished the aristocratic element and the type with the oval face, straight forehead, narrow and often aquiline nose, horizontal almondshaped eyes, and olive skin, a type which recalls in miniature the Malayo - Polynesian. The Yamatos, landing on the south-east of Kiu-siu, drove back by degrees the Kmaço towards the north-east. The fusion between the two races was slow; the strife was prolonged to the middle of the second century of the Christian era. The Ainus, driven from Nippon in the seventh, held their own from the ninth to the sixteenth century in the island of Yeso. Then they lost their independence and retreated towards the extreme north of Yeso, and into the little archipelago of the Kouriles. They now number less than twenty thousand and are gradually dwindling; but here and there atavism revives some of their characteristics in their ancient home.

The civilisation of Japan was tardy and entirely Chinese. It was not until the sixth century that the worship and doctrine of Confucius, Ko-si, the