RECENT BOOKS BY A CHINESE 

 SCHOLAR 



JOHN C. FERGUSON. 



It is often said that scholarship in China is at a very low 

 ebb at the present time. While this is true to a certain 

 extent, there are many circumstances which explain the 

 paucity of new books. The abolition of the civil service 

 examinations — k' o chii — put an end to the steady publication 

 of books giving examples of well-written essays and explain- 

 ing earlier literary writings from the standpoint of their use 

 in essay writing. This is also true of books relating to poetry 

 and to historical references both of which subjects were of 

 vital importance to the candidate for official preferment in 

 the examination. To take the place of these books, with a 

 public which had been accustomed to reading, there came 

 from the presses a steady flow of translated and compiled 

 books. These treated of all branches of modern knowledge : 

 scientific, economic, governmental, and philosophic. In- 

 numerable books of fiction have also been translated and, it 

 must be said, these have formed by far the largest portion 

 of the examples of foreign thought that have been presented 

 to the Chinese public as representative of Western literature. 

 Such translated books, however, form no' part of the per- 

 manent literature of a nation; their influence is evanescent. 



Another class of books such as the Encyclopaedia, 

 Tz'ii Yuan published by the Commercial Press, shows the in- 

 fluence of Western methods of learning. It is an example of 

 the systematized and condensing process so common in our 

 Western book making. There is nothing new in this En- 

 cyclopaedia, but the arrangement of its contents makes all 

 the knowledge it contains readily valuable to a student. 

 In addition to this, it adds a large mass of information on 

 scientific subjects : foreign geography and names of historical 

 personages important in Western literature. As a whole, 

 it is much more useful to the' student of Chinese literature 

 at the present time than the P'ei Wen Yiin Fu. This 

 Encyclopaedia was compiled by a body of scholars well 

 versed in the ancient literature of their own country and 



