According to the same tradition the now desolate regions of the waterless land of Tarim—a veritable wilderness in the heart of Turkestan—were in days of old covered with flourishing and wealthy cities. At present, a few verdant oases only relieve its dread solitude. One such, carpeting the sepulchre of a vast city buried under the sandy soil of the desert, belongs to no one, but is often visited by Mongolians and Buddhists. The tradition also speaks of immense subterranean abodes, of large corridors filled with tiles and cylinders. It may be an idle rumour, and it may be an actual fact. All this will very likely provoke a smile of doubt. But before the reader rejects the truthfulness of the reports, let him pause and reflect over the following well‐known facts. The collective researches of Orientalists, and especially of late years the labours of students of Comparative Philology and the Science of Religion, have enabled them to ascertain that an incalculable number of MSS., and even of printed works _known to have existed, are now to be no more found_. They have disappeared without leaving the slightest trace behind them. Were they works of no importance they might, in the natural course of time, have been left to perish, and their very names would have been obliterated from human memory. But this is not so, for, as now ascertained, most of them contained the true keys to works still extant, and now _entirely incomprehensible_, for the greater portion of their readers, _without these additional volumes of commentaries and explanations_. Such, for instance, are the works of Lao‐tse, the predecessor of Confucius. He is said to have written nine hundred and thirty books on ethics and religions, and seventy on magic, _one thousand_ in all. His great work, however, the _Tao‐te‐King_, the _heart_ of his doctrine and the sacred scripture of the _Tao‐sse_, has in it, as Stanislas Julien shows, only “about 5,000 words,”(8) hardly a dozen of pages; yet Professor Max Müller finds that “the text is unintelligible without commentaries, so that M. Julien had to consult more than sixty commentators for the purpose of his translation, the earliest going back as far as the year 163 B.C.”, and _not earlier_, as we see. During the four centuries and a half that preceded this “earliest” of the commentators there was ample time to veil the true Lao‐tse doctrine from all but his initiated priests. The Japanese, among whom are now to be found the most learned of the priests and followers of Lao‐tse, simply laugh at the blunders and hypotheses of European Chinese scholars; and tradition affirms that the commentaries to which our Western Sinologues have access are not the real _occult_ records, but intentional veils, and that the true commentaries, as well as almost all the texts, have long _disappeared_ from the eyes of the profane. Of the works of Confucius we read: