i894. NOTES AND COMMENTS. 91 



tendency seems to be in quite an opposite direction. Some of our 

 fin-de-siecle young men, influenced, it would seem, by Japanese im- 

 pressionism and Japanese grotesqueness, seem to have forgotten the 

 chief ideal of the Japanese artist, who, like Caleb Plummer, "tries to 

 go as near to nature as he can for sixpence." 



An interesting example of the assistance which the accurate yet 

 delightful art of Japan may render to the scientific enquirer occurs 

 in a paper by Dr. C. Schlumberger in the last number of the Memoirs 

 of the Zoological Society of France (vol. vii., p. 63, and pi. ii.). The 

 so-called dancing mice of Japan are a breed as to the origin of which 

 there has been some little discussion. The peculiarity of these 

 animals is that they twist rapidly round, apparently in pursuit of their 

 own tails, as kittens or puppies are sometimes made to do with us. 

 This dervish-like habit is supposed to be due to a crook in the brain, a 

 mild insanity perhaps produced by some artificial selection or cross- 

 breeding. Now, Dr. Schlumberger has come across a Japanese 

 netsitke, the carved ornament of a tobacco-pouch, which represents a 

 family of these dancing mice. The father and mother and eight little 

 ones are reproduced with the utmost minuteness in characteristic 

 attitudes. The chief interest of this work of art lies, however, in 

 its colouring. The father and mother and four of the young ones 

 have white coats spotted with black ; two of the young are quite black 

 and two quite white. The mother and the two white young have 

 pink eyes, while those of all the others are black. Dr. Schlumberger 

 theiefore infers that the dancing mice of Japan are the product of 

 artificial crossing between well-defined melanic and albino varieties. 



In Old Japan. 



A pvopos of Japan, Mr. F. A. Bather, whose recent report on 



Natural Science in that country will be remembered by our readers, 



favours us with the following note : — 



" Mr. Kumagusu Minakata, whose knowledge of Oriental science 

 has often been shown in his interesting letters to Nature, points out 

 that, in the course of transcribing my notes, I have confused the date 

 of Kaempfer's birth with that of his arrival at Nagasaki. He was 

 born in 1651, and first visited Japan in i6go. Consequently the 

 interval between Kaempfer and Siebold was not 175 years, as stated 

 on p. 24, but 135. . . . Some observations condensed from Mr. 

 Minakata's letters to me may serve to supplement and correct my 

 hasty sketch. So far as the past is concerned, the title ' Natural 

 Science in Japan ' should be held to refer to European science, and 

 not to the knowledge that the Japanese themselves had of their own 

 lands and seas. Crude as it was, yet the Japanese, imbued with 

 Confucian maxims, vivified by poetical learning, excited by magical 

 formulae and anxious for medical knowledge, had a Natural Science 

 of their own, which, though borrowed from the Chinese, was by no 

 means unimproved since its transportation. For instance, Li Shi-Chin's 

 ' System of Materia Medica ' — of which the Japanese naturaUsts 

 were the commentators, as the mediaeval scholars of Europe were of 

 Aristotle and Pliny — placed such parasitic phsenogams as Gastrodia 



