The Ya-ch’io Miao offer in sacrifice an ox to Heaven and a pig to Earth, and once every thirteen years they sacrifice buffaloes to Heaven. Their sorcerers are men who wield great power, and it is a hereditary profession. The sorcerer must wear a special kind of hat when he is engaged in divination: without it he is powerless. He has special books (of which I am fortunate enough to possess one) with movable disks, superimposed one on another, for casting horoscopes. These books are handed down from generation to generation, and used to be copied out by hand; but nowadays they are printed. Such books were brought by an I-chia, who had become a Christian, in order to have them burnt; the missionary asked leave to keep them instead, explaining their historic value. The accompanying illustration is taken from one of these priceless old MSS. describing the Creation. It is written on a brittle kind of paper, extremely worn and fragile, and the leaves are fastened together with twisted strips of paper, acting as a string. This is a peculiarly Chinese way of binding, such as you may see students practising any day in class to fasten their notes. The colour of the paper is brown, the characters black, and the illustrations are painted in several shades of yellow and brown, forming a harmonious whole. The upper circle, containing a bird, is the moon; and the lower circle, containing a beast, is the earth. Dr. Henry brought a large number of MSS. back from Yünnan, which are now in the British Museum, but they differ in certain respects from mine. In the first place, they contain no diagrams; secondly, they are all divided up metrically into groups of five characters, or seven; mine are not all divided into groups (as may be seen from the illustration, Ancient I-chia Script), and those that are in groups vary in number, four, or five, or six. He says that the subject-matter of all the MSS. which he studied is religious ritual, genealogies, legends and song, and all are written in verse. The script is quite unique: it is pictographic in origin, not ideographic like the Chinese. Many Chinese words are compound, one part denoting sound, the other part denoting meaning: Lolo words are never compounds.