closely into the question of the policy of cultivating closer relations with the foreign people who asserted their supremacy on the sea and who had already subjugated one great Asiatic empire. But it may at least be said that he did nothing to make the ultimate solution of the question more difficult, and his flattering reception of Lord Macartney's embassy was an important and encouraging a precedent for English diplomacy with China. The events of internal interest in the history of the country during the last twenty years of this reign call for some, brief notice, although they relate to comparatively few matters that can be disentangled from the court chronicles and official gazettes of the period. The great floods of the Hoangho and the destruction caused thereby had been a national calamity from the earliest period. Keen Lung, filled with the desire to crown his reign by overcoming it, intrusted the task of dealing with this difficulty to Count Akoui, whose laurels over the Miaotze had raised him to the highest position in public popularity and his sovereign's confidence. Keen Lung issued his personal instructions on the subject in unequivocal language. He said in his edict, "My intention is that this work should be unceasingly carried on, in order to secure for the people a solid advantage both for the present and in the time to come. Share my views, and in order to accomplish them, forget nothing in the carrying out of your project, which I regard as my own, since I entirely approve of it, and the idea which originated it was mine. For the rest, it is at my own charge, and not at the cost of the province, that I wish all this to be done. Let expenses not be stinted. I take upon myself the consequences, whatever they may be." Akoui threw himself into his great task with energy, and it is said that he succeeded in no small degree in controlling the waters and restricting their ravages. We are ignorant of the details of his work, but it may certainly be said that the Hoangho has done less damage since Akoui carried out his scheme than it had effected before. The question is still unsolved, and probably there is no undertaking in which China would benefit more from the engineering science of Europe than this, if the Chinese government were to seriously devote its attention to a matter that affects many millions of people and some of the most important provinces of the empire.