38 



THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



"for the sake of peace and harmony in 

 the school." 



Three years of training and practice are 

 not enough to perfect the ordinary pupil 

 in that exquisitely elaborate and refined 

 Japanese art of flower arrangement, 

 where flowers spring, with their leaves 

 and stems, from vases or basins of shal- 

 low water as they grow naturally, but 

 Nature perfected and idealized according 

 to codes of rules made by teachers of 

 such esthetic arts for the past eight and 

 ten centuries. 



Also the gardens, in which these girls 

 gather for decorous play and games of 

 poetry, are as carefully arranged ideali- 

 zations of natural scenery, and the soft 

 colors of their crape and silk kimonos 

 accord perfectly with the unvarying gar- 

 den symphony of gray rocks and ever- 

 green foliage. A soft, grass sandal, es- 

 pecially made for garden wear, protects 

 the precious garden stones and the deep- 

 pile mats of fine, soft grass. 



The indoor ceremonies of receiving, 

 entertaining, and speeding a guest are 

 matters of careful training, for nothing 

 in Japanese life lacks its conventional 

 rules, its elaborate etiquette. The grace- 

 ful dress of Japanese women, its sober 

 tones and long lines, is suited to the 

 dainty house interiors, with their fine, 

 satiny straw mats and luxurious crape 

 cushions. The craze for European dress 

 for women, following upon its adoption 

 as the dress of court ceremony 25 years 

 ago, fortunately died out in due time ; so 



that, except at the palace and on most 

 ceremonial occasions where foreigners 

 take part, Japanese women of highest 

 rank wear their own becoming clothes — a 

 rebuke in its unchanging lines and quiet 

 colors to the insane vagaries of the West. 



Each season has its appropriate ma- 

 terial and colors. Each year the fashions 

 change in ways the purblind foreigner 

 does not see. Each year the theme of the 

 Emperor's New Year poem gives sugges- 

 tion to designers and dyers, and in this 

 way these varying patterns of sashes and 

 neck folds date them precisely to the 

 initiated. 



Great patterns and gay colors are for 

 children and babies, and from the begin- 

 ning of time the Japanese woman has 

 folded her robe over to the right that she 

 might hold the edge in place when she 

 bent in a deep bow. 



Only in death is the kimono folded to 

 the left, so that there is always laughter 

 when the self-complacent foreigner has 

 her portrait taken or goes to a fancy- 

 dress ball, or a theater manager clothes a 

 whole company in kimonos folded ac- 

 cording to the etiquette of corpses. Noth- 

 ing else in the world is so fimny — not the 

 most luckless attempt of the Japanese 

 woman to wear foreign dress — as the 

 failures and burlesque the foreign woman 

 achieves when she essays Japanese dress. 

 The East has its revenge tenfold at those 

 seasons, and photographers' rooms in 

 Japanese cities are chambers of such 

 horrors. 



EXPLORERS OF A NEW KIND 



Successful Introduction of Beetles and Parasites to Check 

 Ravages of the Gipsy-moth and Brown-tail Moth 



By L. O. Howard 



Chief' of THE Bureau oe Entomology, U. S. Department oe Agriculture 



THE story of the gipsy-moth and 

 that of the brown-tail moth are 

 two of those geographic happen- 

 ings unconsidered in the old geography, 

 but important in the geography of today. 

 They are not normal inhabitants of the 



United States, but are assisted immi- 

 grants. The gipsy-moth (see page 50) 

 was brought to this country by a French 

 professor of astronomy in a New Eng- 

 land university in the course of some 

 experimental work which he was doing. 



