the sun, and of the divine right of the dynasty. In the trousseau of the bride the mirror is the most precious object--her one cherished possession. The first-made mirror--or the one held to be such in the estimation of the Japanese, and venerated accordingly--is enshrined in the great sacred twin-palace at Isé, the holy spot to which pious pilgrims turn their steps with devoted zeal. Its origin is related in the famous myth of the sun-goddess, Amaterasu oho-mi-kami, who, on one occasion, withdrew offended to a rocky cavern, leaving the world in darkness. From this retreat she was enticed by the other gods, after many curious artifices had been tried, by their successful making of a mirror, in which seeing her face reflected, she was impelled by jealousy and curiosity to venture forth. This mirror was fashioned by the Vulcan of the Shinto Olympus to imitate the sun, being in shape a disk with eight rays. In modern Japanese heraldry the sun, as blazoned upon the national flag, is a red orb with sixteen red rays, not pointed as in European heraldry, but widening out to the margin of the flag. Some hold that the Japanese imperial crest, the _kiku_, which resembles a flower with sixteen petals joined and rounded at the outer extremities, and issuing from a small central disk, is also a blazon of the sun; others hold it to represent the chrysanthemum. In Japanese pictures of the sun-goddess myth, the mirror is always represented as of the eight-point form. Tradition states that the flaw still to be seen in its surface was caused by a blow it received when the gods thrust it into the half-opened doorway of the rocky cavern as the sun-goddess peeped out. The standard version of the entire myth is to be found in a memoir on the Shinto Temples of Isé by Mr. Ernest Satow, in the second volume of the “Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan” (1873-74). In the British Museum, in Dr. Anderson’s collection of Japanese drawings, No. 1905, there is a silk roll painted in colours, depicting the scene outside the cavern. It is without signature or seal, and the artist is unknown. A further myth narrates the subsequent history of the mirror. It was handed by the sun-goddess to her grandson Nini-gi no mikoto when he descended from heaven to subdue the earth, along with the sacred sword and the sacred seal-stone (the three sacred treasures of the Japanese regalia), with these words: “Look upon this mirror as my spirit: keep it in the same house and on the same floor with yourself, and worship it as if you were worshipping my actual presence.” Nini-gi no mikoto founded the empire of Japan, and is worshipped as the first Shogun, all subsequent sovereigns claiming divine right by descent from him. All mirrors in Shinto temples, whether exposed to view or concealed in shrines or arks, are imitations of this one, though some are regarded as being representative of other secondary deities. At Isé, where the first