I02 SECTION A. GENERAL ZOOLOGY. 



permitted to recall some main features for the sake of those who 

 do not know my paper. 



It is often said that Japan has within recent years made a 

 great progress in all social, political, military, and scientific matters. 

 And we, as a nation, sincerely hope that this is true, and that our 

 efforts to bring ourselves abreast of other nations have met with 

 some degree of success. But to people of other lands this progress 

 seems simply phenomenal and without a parallel. To many in the 

 Occident it appears to be the transformation of a semi-barbarous 

 country into a modern civilized nation in an exceedingly short 

 space of time, and on that account there is a certain amount of 

 misgiving in regard to the genuineness of this transformation. 

 We occasionally hear people expressing fears about a possible 

 relapse into barbarism. To us this appears a very unjust view 

 to take of the recent changes in Japan. If you examine into 

 our history it will be very easy to discover that our country 

 attained a high degree of civilization at the time when a large part 

 of Europe was still in a comparatively primitive condition. The 

 period extending from the seventh to the tenth centuries of the 

 Christian era is often looked on as the golden period of our land, 

 and the masterpieces in literature and art which were then pro- 

 duced are at the present day pointed to as something inimitable. 

 In regard to the more scientific aspect of the period, I may perhaps 

 be allowed to quote a passage from my paper, to which I have 

 referred : 



"It is probably unknown to most persons in the West that 

 early in the eighth century of the Christian era, there was already 

 established in Japan an Imperial University with four departments 

 — Ethics, History, Jurisprudence, and Mathematics — and with the 

 prescribed number of four hundred students. There were also 

 at the same time a bureau devoted to Astronomy, Astrology, 

 Calendar-Compilation, and Meteorology, and a Medical College, 

 with Professors of Medicine, Surgery, Acupuncture, Necromancy 

 (the art of healing by charms), and Pharmacology. The last named 

 branch of study included the collection, cultivation, and investiga- 

 tion of medicinal plants, and thus a considerable amount of 

 botanical knowledge must already have been acquired by that 

 time. Towards the end of the ninth century, when a catalogue of 

 books existing in Japan was compiled by the order of the then 

 reigning emperor, the Imperial library was found to contain 16,790 

 volumes divided into forty departments — and this in spite of a 

 disastrous fire of some years previous. Among the medical works 

 were some with very modern sounding titles, such as ' The Curing 

 of Diseases of Women ' and ' On the Methods of Healing Diseases 

 of the Horse.' Japan in those early days derived its culture from 

 India, China and Corea, but the details above enumerated clearl}- 

 show that educated society must already have attained a high 

 degree of civilization." 



