But as we now learn on the high authority of Professor Legge that it was to the _star group Hiu_ that Tchuen-Hio is recorded to have bound the beginning of the year, we know that if the record is true, the year in Tchuen-Hio’s time must have begun at the _winter solstice_, and not at the _mid-season_, between it and the equinox. When due correction of P. de Mailla’s paraphrase has been made in the passage recording Tchuen-Hio’s reform, there remains still a difficulty to be overcome in the account of this event given in the _Histoire Générale de la Chine_, or rather I should say that it is when we have corrected P. de Mailla’s paraphrase that this difficulty appears. For in the history it is stated that it was from the new moon at the beginning of spring, and near to the star group Hiu, that the year was then and henceforth to be counted, and this statement contains an astronomical contradiction. Our knowledge of the precession of the equinoxes teaches us that the star group Hiu in Tchuen-Hio’s time did not mark the _beginning of spring_, but rather the very _middle of winter_. Unless, then, we throw aside as worthless the whole record of Tchuen-Hio’s reform of the calendar, we are driven to suppose that some Chinese historian, ignorant of the precession of the equinoxes, and writing at a date when, owing to that precession, the first new moon of spring was indeed close to the star group Hiu, and that of the winter solstice far distant from it--that this historian made what he may well have considered a necessary correction in the record with which he was dealing, and substituted the “first day of spring” for the “mid-winter season.” Nor need we much blame him for making such a correction, when we find ourselves driven by stress of modern enlightenment to correct his correction, and to read “mid-winter” where he has written “beginning of spring.” Let us now read with due corrections, between square brackets, the record of Tchuen-Hio’s reformation of the calendar as given in the _Histoire Générale de la Chine_. “Tchuen-Hio ... profitant de la paix dont jouissoit l’empire, transféra sa cour à Kao-yang. Ce fut dans cette ville, que toujours passionné pour la connoissance des astres, il établit une espèce d’académie, composée des Lettrés les plus habiles en cette science. On recueillit toutes les observations anciennes qu’on compara avec les modernes, et on poussa l’astronomie à un degré de perfection surprenant. Les règles sûres qu’ils établirent pour supputer les mouvements du soleil, de la lune, des planettes, et des étoiles fixes, acquirent à Tchuen-Hio le titre glorieux de restaurateur, et même de fondateur de la vraie astronomie. C’est une perte que ces règles ne soient pas venues jusqu’à nous.