VIII.] THE NORTHERN MONGOLS. 307 



heartless lounge of the peasant." It should also be mentioned 

 to their credit that, amid much moral and material squalor, coarse 

 and repulsive habits, they at least possess the sterling quality of 

 honesty. Baron von Griinau tells us that in the villages along 

 his route his effects had to remain on the highway for want of 

 room in the wretched hovels, but he never lost anything, and his 

 watch, after passing from hand to hand for general inspection, was 

 always returned to the owner 1 . 



The religious sentiment is perhaps less developed than among 

 any other Asiatic people. Buddhism, introduced 



Religion. 



about 380 A.D., never took root, and while the 

 literati are satisfied with the moral precepts of Confucius, the 

 lower classes seem to live in a state of complete religious indiffer- 

 ence. Some make offerings to the spirits of the forests and 

 mountains, and there is a " Children's Feast/' when all put on 

 new clothes, probably a reminiscence of Buddhism. Seul, the 

 capital, is perhaps the only city in the world outside Korea which 

 possesses neither temple nor church of any kind. 



Philologists now recognise some affinity between the Korean 

 and Japanese languages, both of which appear to 

 be remotely connected with the Ural-Altaic family, Sc p e t Ko1 

 The Koreans possess a true alphabet of 28 letters, 

 which, however, is not a local invention, as is sometimes asserted. 

 It appears to have been introduced by the Buddhist monks about 

 or before the icth century, and to be based on some cursive form 

 of the Indian (Devanagari) system 2 , although scarcely any re- 

 semblance can now be traced between the two alphabets. This 

 script is little used except by the lower classes and the women, 

 the literati preferring to write either in Chinese, or else in the 

 so-called nido, that is, an adaptation of the Chinese symbols to 

 the phonetic expression of the Korean syllables. The nido is 

 exactly analogous to the Japanese Katakana script, in which 

 modified forms of Chinese ideographs are used phonetically to 



1 Globus, Nov. 27, 1897, p. 322. 



2 T. de Lacouperie says on "a Tiheto-Indian base" (Beginnings of Writing 

 in Central and Eastern Asia, 1894, p. 148); and Mr E. H. Parker: "It is 

 demonstrable that the Korean letters are an adaptation from the Sanskrit," i.e. 

 the Devanagari (Academy, Dec. 21, 1895, p. 550). 



2O 2 



