If Japanese ways look odd at first sight, they but look more odd on closer acquaintance. In a land where, to allow one's understanding the freer play of indoor life, one begins, not by taking off his hat, but by removing his boots, he gets at the very threshold a hint that humanity is to be approached the wrong end to. When, after thus entering a house, he tries next to gain admittance to the mind of its occupant, the suspicion becomes a certainty. He discovers that this people talk, so to speak, backwards; that before he can hope to comprehend them, or make himself understood in return, he must learn to present his thoughts arranged in inverse order from the one in which they naturally suggest themselves to his mind. His sentences must all be turned inside out. He finds himself lost in a labyrinth of language. The same seems to be true of the thoughts it embodies. The further he goes the more obscure the whole process becomes, until, after long groping about for some means of orienting himself, he lights at last upon the clue. This clue consists in "the survival of the unfittest." In the civilization of Japan we have presented to us a most interesting case of partially arrested development; or, to speak esoterically, we find ourselves placed face to face with a singular example of a completed race-life. For though from our standpoint the evolution of these people seems suddenly to have come to an end in mid-career, looked at more intimately it shows all the signs of having fully run its course. Development ceased, not because of outward obstruction, but from purely intrinsic inability to go on. The intellectual machine was not shattered; it simply ran down. To this fact the phenomenon owes its peculiar interest. For we behold here in the case of man the same spectacle that we see cosmically in the case of the moon, the spectacle of a world that has died of old age. No weak spot in their social organism destroyed them from within; no epidemic, in the shape of foreign hordes, fell upon them from without. For in spite of the fact that China offers the unique example of a country that has simply lived to be conquered, mentally her masters have invariably become her pupils. Having ousted her from her throne as ruler, they proceeded to sit at her feet as disciples. Thus they have rather helped than hindered her civilization.