It may almost be a matter of wonder that so little was known of Japan until the advent of the Portuguese. Men were in old times adventurous travelers, and yet, except what is contained in the pages of Marco Polo, written in the thirteenth century, nothing more was known of the existence of the country. The Buddhism of India had permeated China, Corea, and Japan, but it brought nothing back. Mohammedanism, at an early stage, reached China, and gained many converts, and the Arabs carried on an extensive trade with China and the Eastern Isles; but neither by their writings nor by the early native accounts do they seem to have reached the shores of Japan, or, at least, ever to have returned from them. This may perhaps be attributed to the wars of the Crusades, which appear to have lighted up such a fierce feeling between the Christian and the Moslem as to have proved a barrier to the inquisitiveness of the former in his investigations regarding the East. When the Portuguese, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, had pushed their discoveries and trade as far as Malacca, and thence to China, it was to be expected that such adventurous seamen as they then were would, before long, solve the question of a people living under the rising sun. It is fortunate that, among the lawless buccaneers and pirates, as they evidently were, on those seas during this time, one man, Mendez Pinto, should have been found with the zeal to write some account of the doings on the Sea of China, and to lift the veil which, until he wrote, hung over the events which he records. That the latter part of his narrative, relating principally to China, should have been called mendacious, is not to be wondered at. But all that he relates with reference to Japan is not only corroborated by a closer acquaintance with the country and people, but also by the native historians in their accounts of the arrival of foreigners in the country, as well as by the letters of the Jesuits who visited Japan very shortly after it was first discovered by the Portuguese traders. Subsequently to the period at which Mendez Pinto wrote, the history of foreign relations with the country is kept up by the letters of priests and Jesuits who occupied Japan as a field for the spread of Christianity. In the “Histoire de l’Église du Japon” there is an excellent summary of occurrences connected with the Church, its missions, its successes, its difficulties, its martyrs, and its enemies, together with a glance at events in Japan during the most eventful crisis in the history of the country. After the expulsion of the Jesuits and Roman Catholic doctrines from the empire, there are accounts from time to time published by the officers connected with the establishment kept up by Holland at Nagasaki. Caron, Fischer, Meylan--but, above all, Kæmpfer and Thunberg, and Titsingh and Klaproth--and, in our own times, Siebold--have done much to elucidate the manners and customs and natural history of Japan.