Mr. G. F. Meylan, who first arrived in Japan shortly after Fisscher left it, and who subsequently died there, as director, has also contributed something to our knowledge of Japan, by a thin volume published in 1830, like Fisscher’s, in the Dutch language, with the title of “Japan; presented in Sketches of the Manners and Customs of that Realm, especially of the Town of Nagasaki.” One of the most original things in Meylan’s book is his apology for the custom of the Dutch in taking female companions from the Nagasaki tea-houses. None of the male Japanese servants are allowed to remain in Deshima over night. “How, then,” plaintively asks Mr. Meylan, “could the Dutch residents otherwise manage to procure any domestic comfort in the long nights of winter,—their tea-water, for instance,—were it not for these females?” He passes a high eulogy upon their strict fidelity and affectionate activity; and indeed the connection appears to be regarded by them not so much in the light in which we see it, as in that of a temporary marriage. The female inmates of the Japanese tea-houses hold, indeed, in the estimation of their own people, a very different position from that which our manners would assign to them; since not only is the custom of frequenting these houses, as places of relaxation and amusement, general among the men, but sometimes, according to Fisscher, they even take their wives along with them. Of the personal charms of these wives, with their teeth blackened, their eyebrows shaven, their faces white, Fisscher does not give a very high idea. The concubines do not shave their eyebrows, but the custom of blackening the teeth is so common as to be adopted by all females above the age of eighteen. The immoderate use of the warm bath causes them to look, at twenty-five, at least ten years older. Not content with the natural burdens of child-bearing, they augment them by several absurd customs, one of which is the wearing, during pregnancy, of a tight girdle round the body. The works of Fisscher and Meylan are chiefly valuable for the confirmation they give of Kämpfer’s accounts, and as showing the Japanese very little altered from what they were when he described them. A visitant to Japan, and a writer of much higher pretensions, is Dr. Philipp Franz von Siebold, who was sent out, in 1823, commissioned by the Dutch government, to make all possible investigations, as well into the language, literature, and institutions, as into the natural history of the country. The Japanese interpreters understood Dutch so well as to detect his foreign accent, but they were satisfied with the explanation that he was a Dutch mountaineer. He availed himself, as Kämpfer had done, of all means that offered to elude the restrictive laws; and he found, like Thunberg and Titsingh, a certain number of the natives very anxious to obtain information, and by no means unwilling secretly to impart it.