The nature of the relations between these three nations and China, therefore, somewhat resembles that which European nations, we may suppose, now would have towards ancient Greece and Rome, if they still existed as independent powers, and should be visited by scholars from the shores of the Baltic, whose native countries, however, had risen no higher in civilization and morals than their source. The comparison is not complete in all respects, but near enough for analogy. The Japanese have never paid tribute to China, but have been invaded by her armies, and in their turn have ravaged the eastern coasts of the continent. The isolated policy their rulers have adopted, has prevented our tracing those philological comparisons between their original language and those of Siberia or central Asia, which would elucidate its origin. The Japanese up to the time of the sixteenth daïri, named Ouzin Tenwo, had no written character, all the orders of government being proclaimed viva voce. In the year B.C. 284, this monarch sent an embassy to the southern part of Corea, to obtain learned persons who could introduce the civilization and literature of China into his dominions, and obtained Wonin, who fulfilled the royal wishes so satisfactorily, that the Japanese have since accorded him divine honors. Since his day, the Chinese characters have been employed among the Japanese. However, as the construction of the Japanese language differs materially from that of the Chinese, and as the same Chinese character has many meanings, which would be expressed by different words in the native Japanese, confusion and difficulty arose in the use of the symbolic characters. But it was not until the eighth century, that a remedy was provided by the invention of a syllabary, a middle contrivance, partaking chiefly of the nature of an alphabet but containing some traces of hieroglyphics. The characters of this syllabary were formed by taking Chinese characters, either in whole or in part, and using them phonetically, but as indivisible syllables. Consequently, every one of them contained a vowel sound, rendering the language very euphonous. The characters in this syllabary were called _katakana_, i. e. "parts of letters." There were at first forty-seven, but another was added some years after in order to express the final _n_, as _ma-mo-ra-n_, instead of _ma-mo-ra-nu_, making forty-eight, the present number. This syllabary and that invented for the Cherokees by Guess, are the only two in the world. The number of sounds has been increased from forty-eight to seventy-three, by the addition of diacritical marks to some of the syllables. This syllabary enabled the Japanese to express the sounds of their vernacular without difficulty. But the long use of the Chinese had already introduced a great number of sounds from that language into it, besides giving the people a liking for the elegant and ingenious combinations of that unwieldy medium of thought, so that the scholars in