possessing the characteristics in a marked degree of what is termed the Yamato race,—in other words, the elongated features and intellectual aspect as distinguished from the round chubby countenances of the majority of the men and women of the hei-min, or common stock, which forms so large a percentage of the entire population. The Yamato people may have emigrated in the first place from Manchuria, passing through Korea on their way to Japan, and though it may be condemned as fanciful the idea is perhaps not altogether groundless that in seeking to recover Manchuria in recent years from the grip of the Muscovite the Japanese may in reality have been striving, though few were aware of it, to deliver their own ancestral home from the presence of the Western intruder. Jimmu Tenno began to reign as Emperor of Japan in 667 B.C., being then, it is supposed, about thirty-five years of age. Ancient Japanese tradition no doubt assigned to him a supernatural origin, and it is not difficult to trace in the unexpected advent on Japanese soil of the conqueror and his knights the germ of such a belief, supported as it probably was by martial prowess to a degree with which the then peaceful inhabitants of the Japanese chain of islands were totally unfamiliar. The peoples of the adjoining mainland of Asia—that is to say, the Chinese and the Manchus, as well as the Koreans—were appreciably in advance, it is to be presumed, in the arts of war, of any of the islanders of that age, and the invaders, as Jimmu Tenno and his men must have been, of Southern Japan, seven centuries before the Christian era, may have been regarded, and not altogether unnaturally, as beings descended from another planet. The Emperor Jimmu’s mother was a daughter, we are told, of the Sun-Goddess and the Sea-God (the Japanese Neptune) and in this myth may be traced a notable parallel to that concerning Romulus, the founder and first King of Rome, whose father was reputed to have been Mars, the god of war. Romulus founded Rome just eighty-six years before Jimmu became the founder of the dynasty of Japanese emperors, but there the parallel ends, for while Rome became a republic in less than 250 years, and underwent endless vicissitudes, a direct descendant of Jimmu occupies the imperial throne of Japan to-day.