the native cult. This imminent danger was averted by the bold and resolute patriotism of a Shinto priest, Wake-no-Kiyomaro, who, in Luther-like defiance of all peril and personal risks, declared fearlessly, in the very presence of the haughty and menacing head of the Buddhist Church, the divine will, 'Japan is to know no emperor except in the person of the divine descendants of the Sun-Goddess!' Turning now to the question of language, we must confess that the linguistic affinities of Japanese are as little cleared up as the other problems we have been considering. The only thing we know about the Japanese language amounts to this: it belongs, morphologically speaking, to the so-called agglutinative languages, _e.g._, those which express their grammatical functions by the addition of etymologically independent elements--prefixes and suffixes--to the unchangeable roots or base forms. Genealogically, to follow the classification expounded by Friedrich Müller in his _Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft_, who based his system on Haeckel's division of the human race by the nature and particularly the section of the hair, Japanese is one of the languages or groups of languages spoken by the Mongolian race. But this characterisation of our tongue does not help us much. One could as well point to the East at large to show where Japan lies! Notwithstanding the general uncertainty as regards the exact position of our language, this much is sure, that Japanese has, in spite of the immense number of loan-words of Chinese origin, no fundamental connection with the monosyllabic language of China, whose different syntactical nature and want of common roots baffles the attempts on the part of some speculative Europeans to connect it with our own tongue. At the same time, it is well known among competent scholars that Japanese, with its most distant dialect Luchuan, bears great kinship to the Corean, Manchurian, and Mongolian languages. It shares with them, besides the dislike of commencing a word with a trilled sound or with a sonant, almost the same rules for the arrangement of the component elements of a sentence. According to the Japanese syntax, the following rules can, for instance, be applied to Corean without alteration:-- 1. All the qualifying words and phrases are put before those they qualify. Attributive adjectives and adverbs, and their equivalents, are placed before nouns and verbs they modify. 2. The grammatical subject stands at the beginning of the sentence. 3. Predicative elements are at the end of a sentence. 4. Direct and indirect objects follow the subject. 5. Subordinate sentences precede the principal ones.