74 REY. PROFESSOR JAMES LEGGE, M.A., ON 
siderable scale of the adage, Exceptio probat requlam. But 
there was no room for such error in recording the days. 
That only required care from day to day, and needed no 
science. ‘The rule of thumb” was sufficient for it. The 
task of the Recorders in regard to days was not more diffi- 
cult than that of Robinson Crusoe on his desert island, when, 
as he tells us, he marked the lapse of his days by making a 
notch for each. Illness and accident might occasion inter- 
missions and errors in the case of a single individual. The 
entries would be made regularly, when to make them was 
the work of a Board composed of many scholars. 
Barbarous Names in Cl’ien’s Cyclical Table for Intercalation. 
17. We cannot tell when the cyclical terms were first em- 
ployed to chronicle years as well as days. If the entry of 
Kdng-shin in Sze-ma Ch’ien’s history for the year B.c. 842 
was made by himself, the credit of the ingenious application 
is due to him. In his work, however. we find a table con- 
structed for the purpose of intercalation over a period of 
76 years, the first year being B.c. 104. Instead of employing 
the Chinese cyclical characters in it, he uses words of two and 
three syllables, borrowed we may say, evidently, from some 
foreign language. 
This strangely sounding cycle is still 1 of 60, made up of 
10 stems* and 12 branches, The first term in the selected 
period, for instance, properly indicated by ting-ch’du, appear in 
it as Yen-fang Sheh-t'i-ko. Where did Ch’ien find all his 
dissyllables and trisyllables? He did not invent them him- 
self, for we find two of them in the poem called Li Sédo, 
written by. Ch’ii-yiian of the 4th century, B.c., whose suicide 
is still commemorated in parts of China by the festival of 
Dragon Boats. And the outlandish thing did not long 
maintain itself. The polysyllables were superseded in the 
time of the usurper Mang, that is, in the period A.D. 9-22, by 
the monosyllables of the cycle proper. They all occur, 
indeed, in the vocabulary or Rudimentary Dictionary of the 
R Yd, which is mainly a compilation of the Han Dynasty.f 
* The Historical Records, Bk. 26, the 4th of Ch’ien’s Monographs. 
The ten stems are read: yen-fing, twan-maing, yt-chao, chiang-wi, 
t'd-wei, chf-li, shang-hing, chéo-yang, hang-ai, and shang-chang ; and 
the twelve branches are sheh-t’-ko, tan-eh, chih-hsii, ta-mang-lo, 
tun-tsang, hsieh-hsiah, cl’ih-fun-jo, tso-eh, yen-mau, tda-yiian-hsien, 
k’wun-tun, and jui-han. 
+ See Wylie’s Notes on Chinese Literature, p. 7. He says :—“ The 
authorship is attributed, with considerable probability, to Tsze-hsia (one of 
