1G4 REVIEWS OF RECENT BOOKS 



being the forerunner of true porcelain. True porcelain is found only 

 when the Kaolin skeleton is permeated and bound together by the 

 more fusible glass of petuntse, which makes the ware strong, im- 

 pervious and translucent. Kaolin alone gives rise to a ware which is 

 porous, fragile and opaque. Petuntse alone merely fuses into a shape- 

 less mass. Kaolin was known at least in a.d. the 3rd Century ; but of 

 petuntse the knowledge is less definite. From the time of the por- 

 celanous glaze of the post-Han period the Chinese went on perfecting 

 their glazing. The knowledge of glazing rendered the making o,f 

 porcelain a possibility. No porcelain was produced in the Han 

 dynasty ; the first gropings after a porcelanous ware are found at the 

 end of the Later Han dynasty. This ware became an entity in the Wei 

 dynasty (a.d. 3rd Century) and through the 6th and beginning of the 

 7th Century finally resulted in the production of a true white porcelain. 

 There exists at the present time a direct Alaskan-Chinese trade 

 in 'fish teeth' or walrus tusk ivory ; also of elephant tusk ivory from 

 India. A.S. 



A Preliminary List of the Plants of Kiangsu Province. Compiled 

 from various sources by Prof. N. Gist Gee, Shanghai. Com- 

 mercial Press, 1915. 

 For some time past Prof. Gee of Soochow University has been 

 engaged in the very useful task of codifying in simple form suitable 

 for Chinese students the miscellaneous and elusive scientific literature 

 of Chinese Natural History from foreign sources. The work involved 

 is great and the result will prove of incalculable value to those who 

 have at present to laboriously grope through innumerable periodicals 

 for scraps of knowledge. The present list presents botanical classifica- 

 tion in an unusually lucid way. A. S. 



Harvard Medical School of China Reports, 191 1-1916. Collected 

 by the Executive Committee, Cambridge, Mass. U.S.A., 1918. 

 These reports give a carefully compiled record of the work of the 

 Harvard Medical School in their intention of founding a medical school 

 for Chinese in Shanghai. Such a school, which had for its standard 

 the high one of the Harvard University itself, made greatly for the 

 uplift of Chinese medicine. The school after five years work was 

 abandoned when it became known that the Rockefeller Medical 

 Foundation had decided from their immense financial resources to 

 undertake the same function in Shanghai. A. S. 



