These wonder tales have fallen upon no incredulous ears in the past. Accustomed to attribute almost every phenomenon of nature to the intervention of supernatural powers, to people every rock and tree with its familiar spirit, "to hear the menace of a god in the thunder, and see the beneficence of a deity in the rain," they have had little reason to question the truth of stories in which the occult and supernatural plays little greater part than it daily appears to in the course of their own lives. Their religion is not a system which we can define as that of Tao, Buddha, or Confucius, although all these have contributed to give form to ceremonies and observances; the worship of the spirits of the dead, with a kind of fetichism even more primitive, constitutes the principal element of their belief. We may discover traces of Buddhistic teachings in their worship of Kwan Yin, in their ideas as to the transmigration of souls, and in their abstinence from eating beef; of Taoism, in the spiritual hierarchy under which all of their gods, buddhas, and demons are made to find a place, and of the Literary Cult, in those methods of divination and forms of worship, still practiced as in the times of Confucius and the sages, by whom they were recorded; but deeper and stronger than these is their belief in the continued presence of the spirits of the dead and their controlling influence upon the fortune and destiny of the living. Such ceremonies as are observed by the Chinese here have for their object the propitiation and expulsion of these phantoms; prayers and offerings are made to higher powers, but their aid is invoked for protection against the spirits of the dead and those malignant forces in nature with which they are believed to be often associated. Contact with our civilization must bring with it a more correct conception of the physical universe and dissipate many of these illusions. A knowledge of our sciences will give China a new place in history, and we cannot fail to look with interest upon these first representatives of its capable and extraordinary people among us, who may some day play no small part in the awakening of their country to a knowledge of the resources of the Western World. * * * * * [Footnote 1: The accompanying map of the province of Kwantung is reproduced from the Ho Hoh T'ung Shú ("the Concord Almanac") for the year 1855. The situations of the several districts mentioned in the text are indicated by corresponding figures in red upon the map. The scale of the map is about eighty-five miles to the inch.] [Footnote 2: Hon. George F. Seward, _Chinese Immigration in its Social and Economical Aspects_, New York, 1881, p. 191.] [Footnote 3: _The Chinese in New York, The New York Daily Tribune, June 21, 1885._] End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of China in America, by Stewart Culin