CHINESE CHRONOLOGY. 79 
For about 400 years the strange names and their application 
in chronology are to be found in Chinese literature, and then 
they disappear. We may compare the case to what geologists 
call a fault in a stratum or vein which occasionally interrupts 
the progress of mining operations. Where did they come 
from? What is the meaning of them? I have in vain 
explored the documents of Chinese literature for answers to 
these questions. The Rk Yé has come gown to us with a 
commentary by Kwo P’o, a famous Taoistic scholar and 
antiquarian, who died in A.D. 324; and he tells us that he did 
not understand those names, and put them on one side, with- 
out attempting to explain them. A discovery may be in 
store for the explorers in Sanskrit or Assyriology, or some 
other Eastern mine. But let it be borne in mind that the 
use of the cycle of sixty for the measurement of days, and, 
possibly, other periods of time, was long—very long—anterior 
to Sze-ma Chien. How it arose is another mystery, and to 
me a deeper mystery than his application of it with strange 
names to the chronology of years. 
In Twan Chang-chi's tables, to which I have made reference 
more than once, “the stems and branches” are entered as an 
invention of one of the Celestial Augustuses millions of years 
ago; and then, again, the same tables say that Hwang Ti 
commissioned Ta-NAo, one of his ministers, to make the 
Chia-tsze cycle. This last is the current tradition, which 
further places the achievement in Hwang-Ti’s 60th year, 
which would be B.c. 2637, The same statement is found in 
the introductory chapter to Chai Usi’s Redaction of Sze-ma 
Kwangs History. The only authority given there, however, 
for the statement is the work of Lid Sha of our 11th 
century, whom I have already mentioned as an associate of 
Sze-ma Kwang. But Ta-Naéo does not appear in Clh’ien’s 
Records, nor in the Bamboo Annals, nor in Pan Ki’s History 
of the first Han dynasty; and Iam not able to accept him 
as a historical personage. It remains for scholars to discover 
when and where the cycle of sixty first arose, and its terms 
took the peculiar and elegant nomenclature which they have 
in Chinese. Both the stem and branch names appear 
frequently in the Shi Ching in the Books of Chau. But the 
Sha contains only one such earlier specification of a day,— 
in the 4th of the Books of Shang, representing probably a 
the ablest of Confucius’ disciples), though there is a tradition that a part 
of this had also been handed down from Chiu Kung.” But it has been 
proved to be in many parts only of the Han. 
