Nov. 4, 1880] 



NATURE 



through the Main Island gives U5 the other side of the 

 picture to that seen in such well-known centres as Tokio, 

 Yokohama, and Kioto—by far the finest city in Japan, the 

 home of art and culture, according to Miss Bird. She gives 

 very sad and sometimes very disgusting pictures of the 

 condition of the people in some parts of the country 

 through which she passed with her amusing and clever 

 guide Ito. In one district the villages, she tells us, have 

 reached the lowest abyss of filthiness ; stdl she found the 

 people here, as everywhere else, courteous, kindly, m- 

 dustrious, and free from gross crimes. Indeed, although 

 naturally an object of intense interest 

 wherever she went, and the centre of 

 hundreds and sometimes thousands of | 



eyes, she had rarely if ever to complain 

 of discourtesy. Everywhere everybody 

 was courteous and obliging, and except 

 in the open towns, rarely was an attempt 

 at extortion made. While part of the 

 centre of the island is dreary enough, 

 much of it is of the rarest beauty, with its 

 fine mountains, rich woods, and rapid 

 deeply cutting rivers. At Niigata and 

 other open ports she notes with satisfac- 

 tion the rapid spread of European medical 

 treatment under the care of the medical 

 missionaries, some of whom are doing ex- 

 cellent work. At Niigata, especially Dr. 

 Palm's influence is wide-spread, and 

 thousands of people have been weaned 

 from the Chinese system of treatment to 

 that oftercd by Dr. Palm and his numerous 

 native assistants, most of them men of the 

 best type, who have established among 

 themselves a society similar to some of 

 the medical societies which meet in London 

 and elsewhere. At Niigata Miss Bird 

 made the acquaintance of an interesting 

 bookseller. "'This bookseller, who was 

 remarkably communicative, and seems 

 very intelligent, tells me that there is not 

 the same demand now as formerly for 

 native works on the history, geography, 

 and botany of Japan. He showed me a 

 folio work on botany in four thick volumes, 

 which gives root, stalk, leaf, flower, and 

 seed of every plant delineated (and there 

 are 400), drawn with the most painstaking 

 botanical accuracy, and admirable fidelity 

 to colour. This is a book of very great 

 value and interest. He has translations 

 of some of the works of Huxley, Darwin, 

 and (Herbert Spencer, which, he says, are 

 bought by the young men attending the 

 higher school. The 'Origin of Species' 

 has the largest sale. This man asked me 

 many questions about the publishing and 

 bookselling trade in England, and Ito 

 acquitted himself admirably as an inter- 

 preter. He had not a single book on any 

 subject connected with religion." 



In a letter from Kaminoyama, to the north-cast of 

 Niigata, she gives a graphic picture of the incongruities 

 to be met with in the present transition state of the 

 country :— " We rode for four hours through these 

 beautiful villages on a road (our feet wide, and then, to 

 my surprise, after ferrying a river, emerged at Tsukuno 

 upon what appears on the map as a secondary road, but 

 which is in reality a main road twenty-five feet wide, well 

 kept, trenched on both sides, and with a line of telegraph 

 poles along it. It was a nt\s world at once. The road 

 for many miles was thronged with well-dressed foot- 

 passengers, kuninias, pack-horses, and waggons either 

 with solid -wheels, or wheels with spokes but no tires. It 



is a capital carriage- road, but without carriages. In such 

 civilised circumstances it was curious to see two or four 

 brown-skinned men pulling the carts, and quite often a 

 man and his wife — the man unclothed, and the woman 

 unclothed to her waist— doing the same. Also it struck 

 me as incongruous to sec telegraph wires above, and 

 below, men whose only clothing consisted of a sun-hat 

 and fan; while children with books and slates were 

 returning from school, conning their lessons." 



As far north as Kubota, quite 200 miles north of 

 Niigata, Miss Bird found a normal school established, with 



twenty-five teachers and 700 pupils between the ages of six 

 and twenty. "They teach reading, writing, arithmetic, 

 geography, history, political economy after John Stuart 

 Mill, chemistry, botany, a course of natural science, 

 geometry, and mensuration." Indeed she found evidence 

 everywhere of the schoolmaster being abroad all over the 

 country, and of the purpose of the Government to make 

 education, after the models of Europe and America, uni- 

 versal and compulsory ; and among the educated classes, 

 the familiarity with the works of the most advanced 

 English scientific writers —Huxley, Darwin, and Spencer 

 especially — struck her greatly. 

 To the ethnologist Miss Bird's notes on the Ainos, the 



