Quarritch, a London bookseller, lately advertised for sale a Chinese book from the library of the emperor Khang-Hi, bearing the following title: _Yu Sionan Row-wen youen kien_--that is, "Mirror of the Profound Resources of Ancient Literature," being extracts from those profound resources arranged chronologically in the order of their production; but the singular thing about the book is its typography. It is printed in inks of four different colors. All the articles dating from the time of Confucius (B.C. 550) to the Mongol dynasty (A.D. 1260) are printed in black, with punctuations in red. All names of persons and places are upon scrolls, to distinguish them from the ordinary text. Observations upon the emperor Khang-Hi (who annotated the whole book autographically) are printed in yellow, the color of the reigning dynasty; those upon scholars and authors living at the time of the publication of the book are printed in red, the color of the living; those upon persons deceased in blue, the mourning color of China. The work is in twenty-five volumes, preserved in four cases. It was printed in 1685. In the infancy of astronomy the moon and all the planets of our solar system were supposed to be gliding along over the smooth blue firmament like a boat upon smooth water or a sleigh upon ice. The blue vault was a solid substance; hence the word _firm_ament. In this vault were set the "fixed" stars, and of course the moon or any planet passing across it might run straight into the constellation Leo or some other dreadful beast; and this explained why direful things happened to this world, which was supposed to be the only world in the universe. As the moon has always been the most observed of all the heavenly bodies, and as she passes most rapidly across the constellations of the zodiac, it is easy to understand that her phases should excite profound wonder, and that strange effects should be predicated upon these phases, called "changes" from time immemorial. In fact, however, the moon is not "changing" at one time any more than at another. She is continually passing in and out of the earth's shadow as she revolves around the earth, and the width of this shadow, with the state of being in the full light of the sun, constitutes her phases or changes. She does not "enter" any sign of the zodiac in the sense of entering, as understood by the illiterate; and if she did, the signs Cancer, Leo, Virgo, have no comprehensible relation, to plants or parts of the human body. Again, if the moon or sun, or any of the planets, are said to "enter" these signs, they are not now the same as the constellations known as the Crab, the Lion, the Virgin. They did correspond some two thousand or more years ago, when the zodiacal belt was divided into twelve parts and named; but at present, on account of the nutation or gyratory motion of the poles of the earth, the signs of the zodiac (not the constellations) are drifting westward at the rate