which it had been invested during the long course of our history, and by his endeavours it approached again its original status as a simple moral cult with primitive rituals; but at the same time it gained immensely in strength, for it now found its main support in the nationality deeply rooted in the daily life of the ancient Japanese. By him the Japanese were reminded of their national beginning. This philological study of ancient Japan owed much, in its early stage, to the stimulus given by the growth of historiography in the seventeenth century. This study of and the endeavour to write down the national history came of course from the political necessity of the time. As early as the fourth decade of the seventeenth century, the Shogunate is said to have ordered its court literati to compile the history of our country from the earliest times, but it was suspended afterwards for a while. A little posterior to this, a memorable historiographical institute was initiated by Mitsukuni Tokugawa, one of the grandsons of Iyeyasu and lord of Mito. For the first time in our country, the collection of historical materials was undertaken on a grand scale. Collectors were despatched to many provinces where a rich harvest was expected. Kyoto and its vicinity were ransacked with special attention. The material thus rummaged and collected, varying from those of authentic kinds such as memoirs of ancient courtiers and court-ladies, chronicles kept in shrines and temples, and documents concerning the transactions of numberless manorial estates, down to less reliable sorts of materials such as stories, legends, tales, novels, and various other writings current in successive ages, had been criticised in their texts with tolerable scientific conscientiousness. The _Dai-Nihon-shi_, or "The History of Great Japan," which is the result of the cooperation of the historians of the Mito school engaged in researches under the auspices of Mitsukuni and his successors, consists of two hundred and thirty one volumes, and has taken two centuries and a half for its completion, the last volume having been published in 1906. In its form the grand history is an imitation of the _Shih-chi_ by Ssuma-chien of the Han dynasty, the whole system being divided into the three sections of the annals of the emperors, biographers of noted personages, and miscellanies, with various tables. It is by no means a complete history of Japan, for it comes down only to 1392, the year in which the two rival houses of the Imperial family were united and put an end to the long civil war. Moreover, it was only in the middle of the nineteenth century, that the first two sections were put into print, though as manuscripts those parts had been finished much earlier. It is not, therefore, on account of the publication of the history, but of the researches themselves and their by-products, that the historiography of the Mito school greatly influenced the rise of the nationalistic spirit of the Japanese.