During our stay at Tokio, we visited the Imperial University, where we found the Department of Anthropology well organized, with Prof. Tsuboi at its head. It should be better housed than it is, but it occupies two entire buildings, one of which is used for recitation rooms, reading room and laboratory and the other as a Museum, in which Japan and her dependencies are chiefly represented. Here we saw extensive collections illustrating the archæology of Japan—which like the rest of the world has had a Stone Age—and the ethnography of the Ainu and the populations of the Loo Choo Islands, the Bonin Islands, and Formosa. We were most interested in the Ainu collections, which are varied and represent arts and industries, weapons, tools, dress, ornament, etc. Were we not about to see all these in actual life in Ainu homes, we should speak of them in detail. Probably the largest collection of Ainu skeletal material in the world is in the University Laboratory; it has been carefully studied and described by a Japanese, Koganei. When on Monday, February 15th, we were ready to start northward things looked squally. It was reported that communication was interrupted. Four Russian gunboats, from Vladivostock, had attacked and sunk a merchant vessel at the Straits of Tsugaru. We were advised to wait in Tokio until the announcement of resumption of communication should be made. Time, however, was precious. We determined to go on to Aomori as if nothing had occurred, and, if we actually found no steamer about to sail, to make our way overland to the northernmost village on the Hondo, and thence, hiring a fishing-boat and hoisting an American flag, to cross to the nearest point of the Island of Yezo. Our railroad journey to Aomori was a matter of some twenty hours. We left Tokio with no snow anywhere in sight, save on Fuji’s summit; when we looked out in the early morning of the next day, we were in the midst of winter. Snow covered the whole landscape, not fresh-fallen snow, but a sheet that had already been there for weeks and months. Aomori itself is a quaint fishing-town and port. Snow lay five or six feet deep in the middle of the street. Shops and houses are built close together, and have a continuous passageway or corridor before them. One may walk, outside, in the middle of the road, on the elevated snow-way, or inside, on the ground level, under shelter of the corridor. Here and there, narrow ways, with steps, cut in the snow permit passage up and down from one to the other way. The markets are interesting, particularly the fish-markets; not only does one see there fishes of ordinary kinds, both large and small, but flatfish, such as soles and skates, cuttle-fishes, both whole and cut into pieces, shell-fish in great variety, and sea-squirts or tunicates, some of brilliant colors. Had we space, we could describe the lacquer which is made here, the New Year offerings to the gods, the boys flying kites