raised, and the croupier, with his separator-stick, parts four coins at a time from the lot, until four or a particle are left, this being the winning number of the game. That the old southern Chinese, as contrasted with the succeeding northern Mongol invaders, invented the language is shown in many of the words. For instance, the word for road or path is called throughout China a “dry way”, and not a road or street. Only the central and southern provinces flood the fields for rice culture, leaving the raised dry paths. Samuel Pollard, a missionary working in Yunnan, is compiling an alphabet and reducing to writing the speech of the hitherto unrecorded aboriginal tribes, the Miao and Lolos. He plans then to give them some western literature in return for the ethnological riches which they give us. They are the most unique people in the world, older even than the Chinese. Their fortresses are in Szechuen, Yunnan and Kweichow provinces, and there are, perhaps, two millions of this fearless fighting race. From dimmest history they have been pressed back to the mountain tops by the Chinese, who have spread out from their original home in the Yellow River valley with four hundred million people. That the Chinese have impressed some of their language, as far as necessary trade goes, on the aborigines can be seen from the following table, there remaining only two (two and five) sounds in these eight, which have not been somewhat influenced: MIAO ABORIGINE CHINESE 1 Ah Ee 2 Ow Erh 3 Tsz San 4 Peu Su 5 Peh Wu 6 Glow Liu 7 Ya Pah 8 Chow Chiu