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found an advocate in the French sinologue Mar. quis d'Hervey de St. Denis, who had met with some additional information in a Chinese history. Prof. Williams summarizes the arguments which make it difficult to regard Mexico as the country spoken of, and mentions two especially, which are derived from Hwui-shin's report itself. One is the manufacture of kin or brocade from the bark of the ft-sang tree (Broussonetia papyrifera); this fabric, called nishiki, is woven of silk and paper, and is still worn by the Japanese. He exhi- bited a specimen of this peculiar cloth which was obtained in 1854 at Hakodate in Yeso ; its iridescence is very remarkable; and no such fabric is known to have ever been woven in any other land. The other proof against Fu-sang being Mexico is the statement that the colours of the king's robes varied with the ten cyclic years which denote the dual action of the five elements, wood, fire, earth, metal, water. This reference shows that at the time the people of Fm-sang knew and adopted the sexagenary cycle for computing time and periods ; while no such scheme is known to have existed among any people on the American continent. The probability was strong, therefore, that Fu. eang referred to the island of Saghalien, a part of which once belonged to Japan under the name of Karafto; this conclusion is supported by the old name Fu-shi koku, or kingdom of Fu-sang, which the Japanese employ for their own kingdom even to this day.
The 18th in the list is the kingdom of Women, a country only reported on the authority of the same priest Hwui-shin. It seems to refer to one of the Kurile Islands; and a legend of the same nature is alluded to by Col. Yule, in his Cathay and the Way Thither, as current in Ma Twan-lin's
Land. The notices are all probably hearsay reports of places in the Indian Archipelago.
The 22nd section speaks of a land of Giants, and from the reference in it to Sin-lo, or Eastern Corea, one would look for it in the Islands between that country and Japan. A small Japanese cyclopædia was shown to the Society, in which a naked giant was represented as holding a richly dressed dwarf standing on his extended palm.
The last of these eastern kingdoms described is Lewchew, but the description confuses the Pescadore and Madji-co-sima groups with their more easterly and civilized kingdom.
The conclusion to be derived from all these various notices of the lands situated east of China is that Ma Twan-lin had no definite knowledge of any of them from personal observation, and gathered his accounts from the most credible sources at his command, supposing that they were all easily reached by Chinese and Japanese vessels.
The fifth and last paper (92 pages) is by Mr. E. D. Perry on "Indra in the Rig Veda." The object of this paper is to give as distinct an account of the god Indra as possible, as he appears in the light shed upon him by the hymns of the Rig Veda ; more especially to determine with accuracy the position held by him in the Vedic pantheon, and his original significance, his Naturbedeutung : i. e. the powers of Nature which lie behind and are symbol. lized by this striking personification. The preliminary part of the work is of course a searching examination of the hymns themselves, and a conscientious interpretation of all passages in any way bearing upon the subject. Great care is taken to avoid two dangers; on the one hand, that of over-hasty combination and comparison with seeming parallels in extra-Indian mytho. logy; and, on the other, that of following too closely what may be called the ritualistic tendency, which puts these ancient hymns (which breathe out the freshness of nature, and display the Indian people in the vigour of youth) on the same level with the religious monstrosities of a cunning, subtle, ingenious and yet frivolous priesthood of a later age, and attempts to explain obscure points in the text by not less imperfectly understood details of the later ceremonial.
The Rig Veda is the only source from which materials have been thus far drawn. The Brahmanas show so decided an advance beyond Vedic ideas that great confusion would have followed any attempt to combine them. The same reason
time.
The notice of the 19th, called the land of Pictured Bodies, is not directly ascribed to Hwui. shin, but to the histories of the same period; it cannot be decided whether tattooing or marking the body with coloured clay like the North American Indians, is meant. This land would naturally be looked for also among the Kurile Islands, as it is placed 2,000 miles north-east of Japan.
The 20th in the list is mentioned by several Chinese authors, and their various accounts of Ta Han only prove that they had no definite idea of its position.
In the next section three separate kingdoms are mentioned : namely, the land of Dwarfs, the Black Teeth Kingdom, and the Naked People's
1 To the first of these perils Myrianthous seems to has often proved disastrous to Alfred Hillebrandt, who is have fallen a prey : his work. Die Acviny oder Arischen represented in this field by two books, Ueber die Güt'in Diosk wren, was published at Munich in 1876. The other | Aditi (Breslau, 1976), and Varuna und Mitra(1877).
