II. 



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Natural Science in Japan. 



I. — Past. 



FEW people in this world have the love of Nature so strongly 

 inborn in them as have the Japanese. It pervades all their 

 life. Religion, art, poetry, daily pursuits and holiday recreations : 

 all are imbued with this nature-spirit, that seems to belong to 

 this nation like it has to no other with which the western world 

 has been acquainted since the days of ancient Greece. 



Pardon me, severely scientific readers, while I illustrate these 

 bold remarks more fully. 



Shinto, "the way of the Gods," which, before the introduction of 

 Buddhism from China, served the Japanese as a religion, and which 

 the restored Mikado has of late endeavoured to re-instate in its 

 former pre-eminence, is a religion, not so much in our modern moral 

 acceptation of the term, as in the primitive meaning that it had for 

 the Romans of old. A veneration of ancestors ; a worship of all the 

 powers of nature, of wind and ocean, sun and fire, food and pes- 

 tilence ; a worship mingled with love that has personified the rivers, 

 the mountains, and the trees of their beautiful native land ; a religion 

 of artless forms and homely prayers, that eschews both the maxims of 

 the " ower guid " and the sermons of the " ower lang," and that 

 is almost pathetic in its natural simplicity : such is Shinto. 



Art, not the conventions of the schools and the copies of Chinese 



masters, but the living naturalism started by Okyo and perfected by 



Hokusai — how it sports with and idealises the minutest facts of this 



natural world ! Natural this art is in its irregularity, even in its 



impossibility, and above all in the life with which it is instinct. It is 



not the remote or the grand that inspires these artists, but the near, 



the quaint, and the beautiful. " The Japanese," one must admit with 



Basil Hall Chamberlain, " are undoubtedly Raphaels of fishes, and 



insects, and flowers, and bamboo-stems swaying in the breeze." 



Not merely the painters, but the carvers in wood and in ivory, 



the workers in clay and in metal, all are caught in the embrace of an 



ardent naturalism chastened by a pure simplicity. With what loving 



diligence the craftsman toils over his golden representation of a 



beetle, with wings, elytra, and mouth-parts all complete, while 



the patience of the sculptor v/ho gave five years to making the 



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