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PREFACE.
xxix
months. Thus the first entry is :- In the first month of spring, on such and such days, the Ti is Thai Hâo, and the Shân is Kâu-mang. Now this Kau-mang was a son of Shảo Hâo, several hundreds of years later than Thai Hào, so that the associating them together in this ceremony could only have arisen in later times.
However we explain the ceremony thus curtly described; whether we see in it the growing prevalence of natureworship, or an illustration of the practice of worshipping ancient heroes and worthies :-Tî appears in the account of it plainly used in the sense of God. In each of the five instances, we have a Tî and a Shăn, not an emperor and a spirit, but a God and a Spirit,-a Spirit standing in the same relation to the God, that Khăn ( =a subject or minister) stands in to a ruler. Thus it was that, by a process of deification, the title of Tî came to be given, in the time of the Kau dynasty, to the great names, fabulous and legendary, of antiquity; and thus it was that it was applied to the heroes Yao and Shun. It may well be that the title Hwang Tỉ, used by a Chinese of the present emperor or of any emperor of the past, does not call up to his mind any other idea than that of a human sovereign ; but being satisfied as to the proper signification of Tî as God, and as to the process by which the title came to be applied to the ancient Yao and Shun, I could no longer render it, when used of them in the Sha, by emperor, and elected to leave it untranslated in the present volume.
To any unimportant changes of translation it is unnecessary to refer. The dates B.C. in the introductions and notes are all one year more than in the translations formerly published. They are thus brought into accordance with those of P. Gaubil and the useful Chinese Chronological Tables of the late Mr. Mayers.
The changes in the transliteration of Chinese names are very considerable. As foreigners are now resident in Peking, it seemed proper to adopt the pronunciation of the
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