Kæmpfer has given a most interesting and instructive account of what he saw in the country during a long residence, and upon more than one progress to the courts at Miako and Yedo. His delineation of the manners and customs of the people of Japan will remain as a memorial of a state of things seen under circumstances not likely to occur again. But the work was published by another after the death of the author, and, in consequence of this, many of the names of men, places and things are nearly unintelligible. Kæmpfer’s work is well known to the Japanese, having been translated or repeatedly copied in manuscript, and is known as “Su koku rong.” It is an interdicted book, and only recently a man was punished upon being detected in the act of copying the translation. The translation by Klaproth of the “Annales des Empereurs de Japon” is a most valuable work, and contains a wonderful amount of information, being, as it were, the complement of Kæmpfer’s work, drawn entirely from books and not from personal observation. The natives of Japan appear to have an intense love and reverence for their own country, and every individual in the empire seems to have a deep and thorough appreciation of the natural beauties and delights of the country. To this the genial climate, the rich soil, and the variety of the surface contribute. The islands lie at such a latitude as to make the air in summer warm without being hot, and in winter cold without being raw. The soil, as in all recent lava soils, is of a rich black mould, raising the finest crops of millet, wheat and sugar-cane, and when supplied in unstinted profusion rearing splendid timber, or capable, when nearly entirely withdrawn, of keeping life and vigor and seeding power in a pine tree of two inches in height. The trees have a tendency to break out into excrescences from plethora. The variety of surface arises from the great height to which the mountains rise in an island which at no part presents so great a breadth as England, and yet slopes gradually from the mountain tops to the sea. Some of these ridges appear to rise to the height of Mont Blanc, one of them, Fusiyama, being upward of thirteen thousand feet in height, and it would appear that other ranges are higher. The great beauty of Fusi (_pah rh_, not two) consists in its rising singly out of a low country with a beautifully curved sweep to a conical apex; and the atmospheric effects changing from hour to hour, as it is seen from thirteen provinces, give such a variety to this single object that it is rightly called by a name to express the feeling that there are not two such in the world. The variations of atmospheric density make it look at one time much higher than at another. It may be seen with its head clear in the blue sky rising out of a thick base of clouds--or the clouds rise and roll in masses about the middle, leaving the gentle curve to be filled up by the mind’s eye from the base to the apex.