In this connection and with special reference to the title Tien=heaven, employed by the Chinese in addressing the supreme ruler, I must quote T. de Lacouperie’s opinion that the Akkadian name=Din-gira and symbol for God, the eight-pointed star, was the origin of Ti, a Chinese character with the same meaning and sound. Mr. C. J. Ball (The New Akkadian Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology) explains the Akkadian Din-gira as composed of di=to shine and gira=heaven and that thus the Accadian name for God is “the shining one of heaven,” which explains why the ideogram is a star. According to Mr. K. Douglas (p. 171) “Mr. Ball has practically demonstrated that the Chinese and Akkadian are the same tongue and that everywhere in China we are reminded of that great centre of civilization in Babylonia.” An investigation of the Taouist religion reveals that it consists chiefly of star-worship, stars being deemed “divine.” “Among the liturgical works used by the priests of Taou, one of the commonest consists of prayers to Tow-moo, a female divinity supposed to reside in the Great Bear. A part of the same constellation is worshipped as a male spirit under the name of Kwei-sing” (Edkins). A name closely resembling the latter in sound, Tseih-ching, and meaning the “Seven Regulators” is now applied to the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. In ancient times, however, according to native authorities, “this term was used to designate the seven bright stars of Ursa Major which subsequently, by an astrological device, were associated with the seven planets; so, that, by metonymy, the latter became the established meaning.”(86) The association of the term “Regulators” with Septentriones is particularly interesting because the seven-day period has been employed in China from time immemorial, the seventh day being invariably marked by the ancient character mih, which means “quiet, secret or silent.” In the modern Chinese almanacs and astrological works “the mih days are marked by the four constellations which correspond among the seven planets to the principal one among them, the Sun” (_cf._ Wylie, On the Knowledge of a weekly Sabbath in China, _op. cit._ p. 86). I am strongly tempted to refer the origin of the Chinese mih or quiet day, on which rest was generally observed, to that remote period of time when, to primitive observers, one of the stars in Ursa Major would have appeared more closely associated with immovability and nearer the polar axis than its companions (see pp. 20 and 21).