the ceaseless flow of water has formed a long sandbank, four feet high, on the southern and south-eastern sides of the site. Just as the water brings down innumerable grains of sand and piles them up near the point where the waters meet, so will the family that buries its dead here be blessed with countless male descendants." _Fêng-shui_ is not a branch of knowledge that deserves encouragement, so I informed the professor that the explanations given in this illuminating document were interesting but unconvincing, and that if he did not withdraw from British territory within three days he would be sent to gaol as a rogue and vagabond. He forthwith returned to his native district and the graveyard of the Chang family remained undisturbed. An incident of this kind affords proof, if such were necessary, that in keeping up the cult of ancestors and in devoting care and expense to the maintenance of the family tombs the Chinese are not actuated solely by feelings of filial piety and reverence for the dead. On the other hand it is equally clear from abundant evidence that self-interest and a desire for material prosperity are very far from being the sole source of ancestral worship. Some foreign critics have tried to show that it springs not from love and filial piety but from a dread of the ancestral spirits and a desire to propitiate them. This view, which has been condemned as erroneous by those who are themselves ancestor-worshippers, is certainly a mistaken one. If, indeed, the average ancestor-worshipping Chinese did not suppose that some material benefit would accrue to him from carrying out the prescribed rites he would doubtless show a flagging zeal in their perpetuation. Even the average European, perhaps, would grow a little weary of well-doing if he were informed on unimpeachable authority that in future the promised rewards of virtuous conduct were to be withheld both on earth and in heaven and that a crown of glory was not for him. The average man, all the world over, is apt to show impatience if he is asked to be virtuous for the sole sake of virtue. Had the ancestral cult been founded on nothing but pure love, reverence and altruism, it might have been kept barely alive from generation to generation by a few of those rare and exalted souls who seem incapable of self-seeking, but it would never have attained universal observance throughout China; had it, on the other hand, been founded on nothing but fear, selfishness and desire for material gain, it might have become popular with the masses but it could never have earned, as it has earned, the enthusiastic approval of the noblest minds and loftiest characters that China has produced. Probably it is the very mingling of motives that has caused the cult of ancestors to take such deep root in the hearts of the people that it is to-day by far the most potent religious and social force to be found in the Empire.