66 REV. PROFESSOR JAMES LEGGE, M.A., ON 
events of their time. They contain in all five different Books 
or Sections; but it cannot be claimed for them, nor indeed 
for the first Book of the next Part, which describes the 
labours of the Great Yii on the inundated country, that 
they are records contemporaneous with the events which 
they relate, though their compilers, I do not doubt, had some 
such records before them. At what time the documents, in 
the form in which we now have them, were composed we 
cannot tell. Ido not, indeed, believe that the compilation 
of the Shfi was made, as Chinese authorities affirm, by Con- 
fucius ; but he was well acquainted with it; and both he and 
Mencius regarded it as giving the earliest account of their 
national history. The existence of Yao, Shun, and Yii is not 
to be doubted. I could as soon doubt the existence of 
Abraham and the other Hebrew patriarchs in our Sacred 
Scriptures. The question is not as to their existence, but as 
to the time to be assigned to them on the chart of chronology. 
According to the common Chinese scheme, the reign of 
Yii began in B.c. 2205; that of Shun in B.c. 2255; and that 
of Yao in B.c. 2357. The Bamboo Books, of course, reduce 
these dates, and their cyclical year of Yao’s accession places 
it in B.C. 2145. 
In The Canon of Yao, which forms the first Book of the 
Shi, that sovereign is found instructing his astronomers to 
determine the solstices and equinoxes by the culminating of 
certain stars, which he specifies. The Rev. Dr. Pritchard, 
Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford, kindly prepared 
for me a chart of the stars as they were visible in China in 
B.C. 2300. This has been published in the third volume of 
The Sacred Books of the East, and an inspection of it shows 
that all the phenomena mentioned by Yao might have been 
seen by an intelligent observer at that date. I do not say 
that this determines the exact place of Yao in chronology, 
and much less that it determimes the year in which his 
reign or chieftaincy began ; but it makes it probable, to say 
the least, that the date assigned to him in the common 
scheme, and the statements in the Shi, are not to be hastily 
set down as extravagant or without good foundation. 
To sum up what has thus far been said :—About the era of 
Kung-Ho, in B.c. 842, there can be no doubt; and China was 
then a very considerable nation. Of earlier dates we cannot 
speak with the same certainty, but we seem to be able to 
trace the prints of its history up to B.c. 2000 and a few cen- 
turies beyond it. The difference of about 200 years in the 
two schemes of which I have spoken need not seriously 
