It appears that medicine was the first science which excited the interest of the youthful Japanese students. They at first managed to obtain from the Dutch some books, containing anatomical plates, which both interested and surprised them on account of the great difference which existed between the figures represented in these works and the fantastic theories invented by the Chinese doctors. At considerable risk, for the laws on the subject were extremely severe, they secretly experimented upon a corpse, in order to compare the results with the anatomical sketches they had obtained from Europe. This led to their procuring a Dutch treatise on anatomy, which, with great difficulty, they translated into Japanese, spending sometimes as much as a whole day upon a single phrase. Before the end of the eighteenth century several Dutch-Japanese dictionaries were compiled, and a good many European works were translated and published privately, and read with all that ardour which fear of persecution ever engenders. Before the commencement of the present century these studies produced practical results, and the country was peppered with furnaces and windmills built after Dutch models. It led, also, to the introduction of several novel industries, which were evidently inspired by some occult European influence. However feeble these beginnings may have been, both European and modern Japanese writers attach a great importance to this early initiation of a certain number of able and learned men to at least one of the languages, and to some of the sciences of the West. It prepared the way for many ardent advocates of European civilization to influence the Japanese to accept European ideas. This was the impression conveyed to me at Tokio by that very able gentleman Mr. Fukuzawa, the editor of the most important newspaper published in Tokio, the _Jiji Shimpo_, or ‘Times,’ who is also founder and director of one of the largest free schools in Japan. He himself had studied Dutch between 1840 and 1850, when quite a young man, and showed me a book translated from the Dutch and published in Tokio in 1770. ‘The days,’ said he, ‘of the old régime in Japan were counted when in 1854 the Americans forced my country to open her ports, and the Shogunate, which had become exceedingly unpopular, undermined on all sides, crumbled to the dust.’