If it is most probable that the Japanese is a heterogeneous race, then what are the elements which constitute it? The results of the investigation of many scholars tend to place the home of the bulk of the forefathers of the so-called Japanese in the northeast of the Asiatic continent. Perhaps, from the purely philological point of view, this assumption may be more approximate to the truth than any other. The singular position of the Japanese language in the linguistic system of the world leaves little room for the hypothesis that the bulk of the race came from the south, though it is not at all easy to derive it from the north. In our language we have very few words in common with those now prevailing in the islands which stud the sea to the south of Japan, or in the southern part of the Asiatic continent. On the other hand, the language the most akin to ours is the Korean, though the gap between it and the Japanese language is far wider than that between the Korean and the other continental languages, such as the Mongolian and the Manchurian. If we take, therefore, linguistic similarity as the sole test of the existence of racial affinity, as many scholars are prone implicitly to do, then the bulk of the Japanese must belong to a stock which stood at some time very near to the forefathers of the Koreans, though not descended from the Koreans themselves. In other words, the Japanese race may be supposed to have had as its integral part a stock of people, who might have lived side by side with the ancestors of the Koreans for a longer time than with other kindred tribes. And if that be really so, the Japanese must have separated from the Koreans long before the end of the prehistoric ages; otherwise we cannot account for so wide a divergence of the two languages as we see at present.