234 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



genii, and spent the night in offering prayers and propitiating 

 sacrifices of rice to the offended deities, while Mr. Campbell doc- 

 tored the man with Liebig's extract. The man had somewhat 

 recovered from his disability, but in view of the discontent of his 

 party, and the risk of going farther into the wilderness under the 

 circumstances, Mr. Campbell made no further attempt to reach 

 the top of the mountain. 



This mountain, the Old White Mountain, as it is called by the 

 Chinese of Manchuria, " is the most remarkable mountain, natu- 

 rally and historically, in this part of Asia. The perennial white- 

 ness of its crest, now known to be caused by pumice when not by 

 snow, made the peoples that beheld it from the plains of Man- 

 churia give it names whose meanings have survived in the Chi- 

 nese Ch'ang-pai Shan, or Ever-white Mountain. This designa- 

 tion, obviously assigned to the White Mountain alone, has been 

 extended to the whole range without apparent reason, for no other 

 peak of it, so far as is known, can pretend to perennial whiteness, 

 whether of pumice or snow. . . . The great point of interest in 

 the mountain, apart from its whiteness, is the lake twelve miles 

 in circuit, according to Mr. James and his party, the only Euro- 

 peans who have seen it which lies in the broad top of the mount- 

 ain at a height of 7,500 feet above sea-level, and is supposed to be 

 the source of the three rivers, Yalu, Tumen, and Sungari. The 

 Tei-Tei-ki (Great Lake), as the Koreans call it, is the nucleus of a 

 mass of legend and fable. It is a sacred spot, the abode of beings 

 supernatural, and not to be profaned by mortal eye with impu- 

 nity. Curiously enough, neither Chinese nor Koreans have the 

 faintest notion of the real character of Peik-tu-San. The Chinese 

 say that the lake is an eye of the sea, and the Koreans tell you 

 that the rock of which the mountain is composed ' floats in water/ 

 for lumps of pumice were common on the Yalu at Hyei-san. My 

 crude geological explanations, that this cho-san (ancestral mount- 

 ain) of Korea was a burned-out volcano, whose crater had been 

 filled with water by springs, were listened to with polite wonder 

 and treated with less credulity than they deserved. I pointed to 

 the black dust, to the clinkers, and to the rocks lining the banks 

 of the Yalu for miles, many of which looked as if they had been 

 freshly ejected from some subterranean furnace, but to no pur- 

 pose. If the occurrences I had spoken of had taken place, they 

 must have been handed down by tradition, and it was useless to 

 cite lapse of time Koreans are ignorant of geological periods to 

 people whose history extends as far back as four thousand years 

 ago. According to my observations, most of the forest between 

 Po-ch'm and Peik-tu-San grows on volcanic matter, which was 

 without doubt ejected from Peik-tu-San during successive erup- 

 tions. The general inferiority of the timber hereabouts to that 



