CHINESE CHRONOLOGY. 79 
Sir Tuomas F. Wave, G.C.M.G.—I have very little, in fact 
nothing, to add that directly bears on the subject of the chronology 
of China. I have naturally been, to a certain extent, a student of 
its history, and have had to pay attention to its chronology sub- 
sidiarily ; but I am not in possession of anything by which I could 
attempt to modify or verify a statement of Professor Legge’s. 
There is one point which I think worth mentioning as due to aman 
who is gone from amongst us, which may be the probable cause of 
a mistake in Mayers’ chronology. Every Chinese student must be 
sensible of the very great service that he has rendered by the 
execution of that very valuable little work. It was printed for 
him a thousand miles away, and he complained to me very bitterly 
of the number of errors both in English and Chinese in the 
subject-matter of his work. 
As regards the subject-matter of the paper to which we have 
listened with so much interest, I think everyone who examines 
Chinese history at all must be struck, not with the diificulties he 
has to face in respect of the antiquity of Chinese history, but with 
the astonishing absence of incidents which we might be inclined 
to doubt. There seems to be no question as to the trustworthiness 
of Chinese Chronology from the Han dynasty, 206 B.c., and I 
think when we read through those ancient records that Confucius 
had before him, and from which he learnt the history of his country, 
we must be struck with this-—that notwithstanding theextraordinary 
length of the three dynasties presented to us, the incidents that are 
recorded are very rarely, if ever, incredible. The ages assigned to 
the individual men are to us, who believe in the patriarchal ages, 
in no instance astonishing. J think it is impossible to doubt, as 
Professor Legge suggests, that Fu Hsi, Shin Nang, and Hwang 
Ti were real personages, and that we have their histories, as 
governors and teachers, before us in one of the most ancient 
chronicles in the world, known as the Shih Chi. I think I should 
go further than Professor Legge has gone into a belief in the 
existence of historiographers in very ancient times, and it is 
very interesting to observe that in their relations to the govern- 
ment, in the acts they recorded, they stood very much as the 
prophets of Israel did. They were not only mere recorders of what 
passed, but they were the mentors of the sovereign, continually 
recalling to him that this act or the other was in defiance—I will 
not say of God, for I do not find in Chinese literature that they 
