credulous corporal of marines who happened to be going his rounds at the time, willing to take his “corporal” oath that the brilliant body started within a few yards of our rail. The heat of the day preceding was very great. Next day, being near the insular empire, target practice was continued; old cartridges drawn, guns loaded and shotted, and preparations made for removing the forward-rail for the clear working of our bow-guns. CHAPTER VIII. When day broke on the morning of the 8th July we got our first sight of the “_terra incognita_”—the hermetic land—the land which had been invaded but never conquered—hence called the “virgin empire.” The high, bold shores of Japan were before us—the “kingdom of the origin of the sun.” Japan has been continually spoken of as the unknown land. It is difficult to see with what correctness this designation should have been given it, unless those countries only are known upon which the physical eye of some numbers may have rested. Taking the extant information at command, it can very properly be said, with Macfarlane, that we “know more of the Japanese than we knew of the Turks a hundred years ago;” and he might have added, than other nations knew of America, though discovered half a century earlier than Japan. The works on the country are numerous; among them those of the Jesuits, and the German and Swedish medical officers of the Dutch prison factory at Dezima. The printed data of the former, and the archives of the Jesuit headquarters at Rome and at other places, could furnish the earliest and most thorough information. “_Les Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses_,” or the pages of Charlevoix, which tell of the labors of the Jesuit pioneer missionary in Japan, Francis Xavier,—make it anything but an unknown land. Then there are the books, whose size might well deter the stoutest, but whose pages would well repay the industrious search of the inquirer—the product of the close observation and assiduous notation of Kœmpfer,[1] Thunberg, Siebold; and the Dezima Opperhoofds—Titsinghe, Doeff, Meylan, and Warehouse Master Fischer, in lesser size; the quaint accounts of old William Adams, pilot, and Captain Saris, Englishmen; the work of the Russian Golownin, as far as he could gather information, while undergoing his hard but perhaps justly retributive imprisonment in Matsmai; the works of Sir Stamford Raffles; Reports of the East India Company; the pages of the Asiatic Journal, &c.