Karpeles points out that the early Egyptian literature was particularly rich in folk-tales, or _Märchen_. It is possible that in Egypt, as in Greece and Persia, the folk-tales as well as the folk-songs, and such an occasional epic as the Poem of Penta-on, were recited to the people by peripatetic reciters or rhapsodists. There are references to such recitations taking place at court and at the banquets of the rich. It would have been interesting if it had occurred to some Hebrew scribe, endowed with a sense of humor, to send for the royal library in Thebes, as a remembrance of the guests who had gone out of Egypt, an Egyptian rendering of the Book of Exodus, or even of the Song of Miriam. =China.=--The dates of the beginnings of literature in China are uncertain. If we could accept as authentic the claims of the Chinese historians, the origins of their civilization must be traced back to a period antedating by thousands of years the accepted records of Chaldea and Egypt. It is, however, I understand, the present conclusion of the archæologists that the beginnings of the development of the civilization of the Chinese, as also of that of the East Indian peoples, are to be placed at a time considerably later than the date of the earliest records of the peoples of Mesopotamia. According to certain authorities, written characters existed in China as early as 5000 B.C. According to others, they first took shape more than a thousand years later. The Emperor Fu-hi, reigning about 3500 years before Christ, is credited with the invention of the Chinese alphabet. As the Emperor was walking near his palace, possibly musing on the inconveniences of ruling a country without an alphabet, his attention was attracted by the beautiful markings of a very large toad that he encountered. He took the beast home with him, and (under the guidance of the proper deity) evolved from the designs on the toad’s back the figures of the original Chinese characters. He very probably said to himself (paraphrasing the old nursery saying), “It looks like an alphabet, and it hops like an alphabet, why not call it an alphabet?” One can imagine a scholar in later years, puzzling over the lengthy series of Chinese characters, wishing that his Imperial Highness had happened to meet a smaller or a less variegated toad.