Another litigant, whose long residence abroad had had no apparent effect on his general outlook on life, came to me very recently with the complaint that on his return from Manchuria he had found his land in the possession of a neighbour. "I went to Manchuria as my family had not enough to eat," he said. "I came home this year and wished to redeem the land I had mortgaged before I went away. But I found it had been already redeemed by my neighbour, a cousin, and he refuses to let me redeem it from him." On being asked when he had mortgaged his land and emigrated, he replied: "In Chia Ch'ing 3"--that is, in 1798. He was merely identifying himself with his own great-grandfather. In another case a man whom I will call A brought a plaint to the effect that he wished to adopt B, and that C for various reasons refused to allow this adoption to take place. On investigation it turns out that B is dead and that it is his infant son D whom A really wishes to adopt. B and D--father and son--seem to A merely different expressions, as it were, of the same entity. This does not mean, of course, that supposing B were still alive it would not matter whether B or D actually became A's adopted son. The rules of adoption in China are strictly regulated. A man cannot adopt any one he likes. Not to mention other necessary conditions, the person adopted must belong to the appropriate generation, that is, to the generation immediately junior to that of the adopter. In the case before us the infant D belonged to the proper generation, and his father B could not have been adopted. To our notions it seems all the stranger that A, knowing this, should have spoken of B when he meant D: yet this manner of speech is exceedingly common. But after all, if we wish to assure ourselves that the individual is not regarded as an independent unit we must rely on stronger evidence than strange verbal inaccuracies. Perhaps the best and most convincing proofs will be found in the restrictions placed on the powers of the individual to dispose of real property.