i894. NATURAL SCIENCE IN JAPAN. igi 



light to fall on the problems of morphology. As for the geologists, it 

 needs no prophet's tongue to foretell that, for many years to come 

 they will furnish the world with observations of novelty and impor- 

 tance in the branch of their science that deals with volcanoes and 

 earthquakes. Petrology also may be indebted to them ; but we 

 hardly dare hope that the greatly altered rocks of Japan will yield 

 the solution of many palaeontological enigmas. 



There is then a fairly wide field in which the acknowledged 

 powers of the Japanese men of science may well be employed, and 

 their foreign colleagues will await its cultivation with a justifiable 

 hope. One department of science exists, however, in which, if we 

 may place any reliance on the opinions quoted above, the Japanese 

 are not likely to make any conspicuous progress. The world, we 

 may conclude, will never hail a great Japanese philosopher, nor will 

 its line of advance be changed by any new principles emanating from 

 Japan. This very bold conclusion may, however, be rendered invalid 

 by changes similar to those which it has already been suggested will 

 do away with other supposed mental deficiencies of the Japanese. A 

 few such possible changes may now be discussed. 



In considering the relations of Japanese science to that of the 

 rest of the world, one of the most patent difficulties, which might 

 almost prevent any relation at all, lies in the language of the country. 

 At the outset there are two obstacles to mutual comprehension : the 

 first is the great difference between the Japanese and European 

 languages in respect of form and construction, the second is the very 

 different mode of writing the two languages. The former obstacle 

 affects the Japanese themselves more than it does the Europeans. 

 There is so much in all European languages that it is almost 

 impossible to express in Japanese ; and even when some sort of 

 translation has been effected, the different habits of thought will still 

 render the result largely unintelligible. Thus we may note the 

 absence of all those personal modes of expression and of that constant 

 reference of all surroundings to the speaker as a centre which are 

 of such universal occurrence in our own speaking and writing. 

 Similar to this is the absence of personification of all inanimate 

 and abstract objects. To quote from Professor Chamberlain's 

 fascinating Handbook of Colloquial Japanese (p. 272), "Not only does 

 Japanese idiom eschew all such fanciful anthropomorphic expressions 

 as ' the hand of Time ' . . . ' Nature's abhorrence of a vacuum,' 

 etc. ; but it goes so far as almost to prohibit the use of the name of 

 any inanimate thing as the subject of a transitive verb. For instance, 

 a Japanese will not say ' The rain delayed me,' thus appearing to 

 attribute an action to those inanimate things the drops of rain ; but 

 he will turn the phrase intransitively." And again (p. 273), " Thus 

 no language lends itself less to the imaginative and mythopceic 

 faculty tiian does the Japanese. When, for instance, a European 

 speaks of ' the strife between Religion and Science,' lie ^ ery likely 



