68 REV. PROFESSOR JAMES LEGGE, M.A., ON 
there was a region where the people had a hole in their 
breasts, and carried one another on a pole which went through 
it, and another region where men’s legs were more than 
30 feet long. Such notices are not history, but silly fables, 
and there are none of them in Ch’ien. The nearest approach 
to them is his account of Hwang Ti’s battles with the rebel 
Ch’ih-yti, against whom he led bears, panthers, tigers, and 
other fierce animals which he had trained to fight; and this 
may be only a metaphorical description of the courage of his 
soldiers. What is more remarkable is that Chien’s account 
contains none of the great inventions, representing mighty 
strides in the progress of early civilization, gathered from 
the mass of ancient legends by the labours of Sze-ma Ching 
of our 8th century, of Sze-ma Kwang himself, and of 
Liti Shi, one of Kwang’s ablest collaborateurs, who ascribe 
them to Hwang Ti, and even earlier men, so that they have 
been prefixed as introductions to some editions of the great 
Histories of Chien and Kwang, and chronicled in Compen- 
diums of them as veritable achievements of social progress. 
Clien might have introduced them into his records, but 
his historical instinct rejected them, and he found no 
solid ground to rest upon earlier than the documents of the 
Shi Ching. ; 
Of the Three Hwang and Five T%. 
13. But when speaking, earlier in the Paper, of the 
ancient institution of historiographers im China, I said 
that provision was made under it for taking care of the 
histories transmitted from earlier times. In the Chau Kwan 
it is said concerning the historiographer of the exterior, “He 
has charge of the Books of the Three Hwang” (meaning 
Great or August ones; the character is different from the 
Hwang of Hwang Ti) “and the Five Tis.” Who were those 
three Hwang and five Tis? The question has wonderfully 
vexed all Chinese archeologists, and hardly two of them 
agree in their replies to it, though the names themselves, 
Hwang and Ti, were associated together by the founder of 
the dynasty of Ch'in to form the imperial designation of him- — 
self and all who should descend from him and occupy his 
throne; and Hwang Ti is now applied by the Chinese to all 
‘foreign potentates who have the title of Emperor. 
Further, in Tso Kh’ii-ming’s Commentary and Supplement 
to the Ch’un Ch’id, under the year B.C. 530, there is a narra- 
tion,—that the lord of the semi-barbarous region of Ch’t 
boasted that his grand historiographer could read the Three 
