Such are, roughly speaking, the elements of Japanese female beauty. Eyes and eyebrows with the outer ends turning considerably upwards, with which your artists depict us, are due to those Japanese colour prints which strongly accentuate our dislike of the reverse, for straight eyes and eyebrows make a very bad impression on us, suggesting weakness, lasciviousness, and so on. It must also be understood that in Japan no such variety of types of beauty is to be met with as is noticed here in Europe. Blue eyes and blond hair, the charms of which we first learn to feel after a protracted stay among you, are regarded in a Japanese as something extraordinary in no favourable sense of the term! A girl with even a slight tendency to grey eyes or frizzly hair is looked upon as an unwelcome deviation from the national type. If we now consider our mythology, with a view to tracing the continental home of the Yamato race, we find, to our disappointment, that our present knowledge is too scanty to allow us to arrive at a conclusion. Indeed, so long as the general science of mythology itself remains in that unsettled condition in which its youth obliges it to linger, and especially so long as the Indian and Chinese bodies of myths--by which our mythology is so unmistakably influenced--do not receive more serious systematic treatment, the recorded stories of the Japanese deities cannot be expected to supply us with much indication as to our continental home. One thing is certain about them, that they were not free from influences exerted by the different myths prevalent among the Chinese and the Indians at the time when they were written down in our earliest history, the _Ko-ji-ki_ or _Records of Ancient Matter_, completed in A.D. 712. There is an excellent English translation of the book, with an admirable introduction and notes, by Mr. B.H. Chamberlain. According to this book, the original ethereal chaos with which the world began gradually congealed, and was finally divided into heaven and earth. The male and female principles now at work gave birth to several deities, until a pair of deities named Izanagi and Izanami, or the 'Male-who-invites' and the 'Female-who-invites,' were produced. They married, and produced first of all the islands of Japan big and small, and then different deities, until the birth of the Fire-God cost the divine mother her life. She subsequently retired to the Land of Darkness or Hades, where her sorrowful consort descended, Orpheus-like, in quest of his spouse. He failed to bring her back to the outer world, for, like the Greek musician, he broke his promise not to look at her in her more profound retirement. The result was disastrous. Izanagi barely escaped from his now furious wife, and on coming back to daylight he washed himself in a stream, in order to purify himself from the hideous sights and the pollution of the nether-world. This custom of lustration is, by