Emperor Yao (2357 B.C.) is said to have sent one of the Imperial Astronomers to "observe the heavens." The heavens of those days must have been well worth observing, for Chinese legends say there were then ten suns,[23] which all rose out of a prodigious abyss of hot water. At one time, it was said, nine of the suns sat every day in the lower branches of a great tree that grew in the land of Fu-sang, and one sat on the topmost branch; but in the time of Yao all the suns climbed up together to the top of the tree and made everything so uncomfortably hot that the Emperor shot at them and succeeded in destroying nine. Since then the world has had to content itself with a single sun.[24] Assuming that the ordinary interpretations of the _Shu Ching_ are correct, it appears that in the Golden Age of Yao the office of Astronomer-Royal, as we should say, was an exclusive perquisite of two families surnamed Hsi and Ho. Four members of these privileged families were sent to establish observatories in the four quarters of the Empire, east, west, south, and north, in order that they might "deliver respectfully the seasons to the people." The passage of the _Shu Ching_ in which this matter is mentioned[25] is of great scientific interest on account of its astronomical details, and of great importance as establishing the reliability of early Chinese records. The only point that concerns us here is that one of the astronomers--namely, the second of three of the privileged Ho brothers--was sent to a tract of country called Yang Ku--"the Valley of Sunlight"--in the territory of the Yü I. His special duty it was to "receive as a guest the rising sun, and to adjust and arrange the labours of the Spring." Monopoly and absence of competition seem to have had their inevitable result; the privileged families of Hsi and Ho fell into utter disgrace, and were charged with having "neglected the ordering of the seasons and allowed the days to get into confusion,"--and all this because they gave themselves up to the pleasures of wine and female society instead of keeping a careful watch on the movements of the heavenly bodies. The Hsi and Ho had evidently become magnates of no small importance, for it was necessary to send an army to punish them. Their main offence, as we gather from the _Shu Ching_,[26] was that they made some sad blunder in connection with an eclipse, and the penalty attached to an offence of this nature was death. The only point with reference to all this that bears upon our subject is that the eastern observatory, presided over by one of the Ho family, was probably situated somewhere in the extreme eastern part of the Shantung peninsula: and though it is open to sceptics to declare that the astronomer, the observatory, and the Emperor himself were all figments of the Chinese imagination, it is equally open to any one to hold, though quite impossible for him to prove, that the Yang Ku--the