CHINESE CHRONOLOGY. 81 
for instance in the Pescadore Islands, which I visited, the islanders 
could not understand ordinary Chinese; and when I have travelled 
elsewhere I have found the same thing much nearer the centre of 
China itself. 
The AutHor.—In China we have certain monuments going back 
before the Christian era, but the inscriptions are very short. We 
have not very old manuscripts in China, but we have some very old 
manusculpts and written characters, such as you would see in some 
parts of my paper, being engraved on stone, that is, cut into the stone. 
In our second century, about A.D. 180, an officer of the govern- 
ment was appointed by the reigning emperor to have cut in large 
tablets of stone all the characters in all the classical writings, and 
they were cut there and set up in the capital near the Temple of 
Confucius. It might have been supposed that these stone tablets 
would have remained, and yet there are only fragments of them 
now at the enclosure called “ the Forest of Pencils” in the West 
of China, in the City of Ch’ang-an; but early in the ninth century 
another set of stone tablets was engraved and set up in front of or 
near the Palace during the T’ang dynasty, and all these tablets 
remain in that enclosure to the present day, and copies of them are 
being taken every day in the year, so that in those manusculpts it is 
just as if some writer were to find complete copies or records of the 
Old and New Testaments, going back, in the first place, to the ninth 
century, and then fragments of one equally complete that went 
back to our second century. Then there are fragments of monu- 
ments of later date cut here and there in Chinese. There are 
some stone tablets in Peking supposed to contain certain verses in 
poetry made in the eighth or ninth century before our era. Paper 
was not made until after the beginning of our era; before then 
the characters were written, now painted, now perforated, on 
bamboo and slips of wood. I am very happy that Sir Thomas 
Wade had no serious objections to urge to any of the statements 
that I have made inmy paper. There is not a single statement in 
it that I have not investigated for myself and pored over again and 
again, and we go back, as I have said, with some sort of written 
authority, to the twenty-fourth century B.C., and we learn there 
that there must have been men and governments and written laws 
long before that, but how long we cannot say. 
Dr. Cottmewoop.—May I add one other question. You say 
that your copy of these books of Record consist of seventy-three 
