372- Voyage of the Novara. 



of tlie Malay Archipelago, and other points. These emigrants 

 supply the labour market in foreign countries, and but 

 seldom return to their families. Numerous placards and 

 pamphlets, pointing out the enormity of child-murder, and 

 dissuading from its commission, are printed annually, partly 

 at the cost of philanthropists, partly at that of the Chinese 

 Government, and widely diffused, yet without producing any 

 diminution in the practice of this appalling custom. 



The custom of distorting the feet of the better class of 

 women at the period of their birth, seems to have arisen from 

 the jealousy of the husbands, who in thus preventing the 

 possibility of gadding about, think they have secured an 

 additional guarantee for the fidelity and chastity of their 

 wives. However, one occasionally hears the first introduc- 

 tion of this singular and cruel custom ascribed to a Chinese 

 empress having once been born with such distortion of the 

 feet, and that in consequence it not only became the fashion 

 among the females of the higher class in those days, out of 

 pure obsequiousness, to imitate by artificial means a dis- 

 figuration accidentally arising from a freak of Nature, but 

 even to recognize it as a necessary concomitant of the 

 Chinese ideal of beauty. 



The Governor of Hong-kong, Sir John Bowring, a dis- 

 tinguished savant, who received the members of the Expedi- 

 tion with the utmost consideration, invited them to his house 

 and endeavoured to bring them into personal communication 

 witli those residents in the colony most interested in scientific 



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