strange or extravagant than what we have. It begins sufficiently well, but the author has hardly enunciated his preliminary apophthegms, when he conducts into an obscurity where we can hardly grope our way, and when we emerge from that, it is to be bewildered by his gorgeous but unsubstantial pictures of sagely perfection. He has eminently contributed to nourish the pride of his countrymen. He has exalted their sages above all that is called God or is worshipped, and taught the masses of the people that with them they have need of nothing from without. In the meantime it is antagonistic to Christianity. By-and-by, when Christianity has prevailed in China, men will refer to it as a striking proof how their fathers by their wisdom knew neither God nor themselves. CHAPTER V. CONFUCIUS AND HIS IMMEDIATE DISCIPLES. SECTION I. LIFE OF CONFUCIUS. 1. 'And have you foreigners surnames as well?' This question has often been put to me by Chinese. It marks the ignorance which belongs to the people of all that is external to [Sidebar] His ancestry. themselves, and the pride of antiquity which enters largely as an element into their character. If such a pride could in any case be justified, we might allow it to the family of the K'ung, the descendants of Confucius. In the reign of K'ang-hsi, twenty-one centuries and a half after the death of the sage, they amounted to eleven thousand males. But their ancestry is carried back through a period of equal extent, and genealogical tables are common, in which the descent of Confucius is traced down from Hwang-ti, in whose reign the cycle was invented, B.C. 2637 [1]. The more moderate writers, however, content themselves with exhibiting his ancestry back to the commencement of the Chau dynasty, B.C. 1121. Among the relatives of the tyrant Chau, the last emperor of the Yin dynasty, was an elder brother, by a concubine, named Ch'i [2], who is celebrated by Confucius, Ana. XVIII. i, under the title of the viscount of Wei. Foreseeing the impending ruin of their family, Ch'i withdrew from the court; and subsequently he was invested by the emperor Ch'ang, the second of the house of Chau, with the principality of Sung, which embraced the eastern portion of the present province of Ho-nan, that he might there continue the sacrifices to the sovereigns of Yin. Ch'i was followed as duke of Sung by a younger brother, in whose line the succession continued. His great-grandson, the duke Min [3], was l See Memoires concernant les Chinois, Tome XII, p. 447 et seq. Father Amiot states, p. 501, that he had seen the representative of the family, who succeeded to the dignity of 衍聖公 in the ninth year of Ch'ien-lung, A.D. 1744. The last duke, not the present, was visited in our own time by the late Dr. Williamson and Mr. Consul Markham. It is hardly necessary that I should say here, that the name Confucius is merely the Chinese characters 孔夫子 (K'ung Fu- tsze, 'The master K'ung') Latinized. 2 啟. 3 愍公.