being, or the yearning for some supernatural state of sinlessness be concerned. A distinguished financier, for instance, may regale his imagination with socialistic dreams of a perfect Utopia; but, when the weekly household bills are presented to him, he deals with overcharges in pence like any other practical individual. From one point of view, the Chinese, already provided with their tonic language at the Confusion of Tongues, marched to the Yellow River, where we find them. From the other, there is no evidence whatever to connect the Chinese with any people other than those we find near them now, and which have from the earliest times been near them; no evidence that their language, their civilization, their manners, ever received anything from, or gave anything to, India, Babylonia, Persia, Egypt, or Greece, except so far as has been suggested above, or will be suggested below. CHAPTER XXXII THE CALENDAR Allusion has already been made to the eclipses mentioned in Confucius' history as a means by which the probability of his general truth as a historian may in a certain measure be gauged. A few words upon the Chinese calendar, as it is and was, may therefore not be amiss. The Chinese month has from first to last been uncompromisingly lunar; that is to say, the first day of each month, or "moon" as it may strictly and properly be called, always falls within the day (beginning at midnight) during which the new moon occurs. Of course, Peking is the administrative centre now, and therefore the observations are taken there with reference to the Peking meridian. As Confucius took his facts and records mainly from the Lu archives, and (we must suppose) noted celestial movements from what was seen by the Lu astronomers, it has always been presumed that the eclipses mentioned by him were observed from Lu too; that is, from a station over four degrees of longitude and one of latitude removed from the imperial capital as it then was (modern Ho-nan Fu). It was the duty of all sovereign princes to proclaim the first day of the moon at their ancestral temple; and even if the Chinese of those days had discovered the difference in "time" between east and west, these princes must each of them have proclaimed the day during which the new moon occurred as it occurred to themselves, in their own State, and not as it occurred to the Emperor's astronomers. On the other hand, when eclipses were observed from the comparatively small territory of Lu, it must have occurred, at least occasionally, that visitors from other states had either the same eclipse or other eclipses to report. If the Emperor's astronomer reported eclipses in Ho-nan- Fu on a given day, it is difficult to see how Lu, which was a centre almost of equal standing with the imperial capital for orthodoxy in rites and records, could have entirely ignored such reports.