252 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. V., No. 112. 



all the grades of esteem, from that of ' the gate 

 of extensive wisdom ' to ' the moon- viewing 

 gate.' The fourteen are only outer gates ; 

 within are innumerable others ; and no gate is 

 without a name. Sometimes the names are 

 simply aesthetic ; sometimes they are moral 

 sentiments taken from Confucianism. The 

 inner life of the people is so entirety in theory 

 only a mixture of the two ideas, — the good 

 and the beautiful, — and the veneration for a 

 name so universal, that there is no structure 

 above the most ordinaiy kind but has its dis- 

 tinct ennobling proper name. 



occupy the space not otherwise built over. 

 It is a peculiarity of the far east that the 

 domestication of nature — to use a term which 

 seems best to express the artificial shaping 

 of nature to man's private enjoyment — is 

 carried to the happy halfway point between 

 the two extremes common with us, and which 

 are represented by the park on the one hand, 

 where we shape very little, and the flower- 

 garden on the other, where we mould a great 

 deal too much. The grounds that a Korean 

 delights to wander through are an adaptation 

 or a cop} T of the features of a real landscape,. 



LOTUS-POND AT THE NEW PALACE IN SOUL, KOREA. 



Then, as to thes econd half of the title, — 

 the term a ' place.' The place is not so much a 

 palace as a collection of palaces. Within is a 

 very labyrinth of buildings, courts, and parks. 

 There are audience-halls for the king and the 

 heir apparent ; then the separate palaces in 

 which they respectively live ; then the queen's 

 apartments, whose size may be imagined from 

 the several hundred court-ladies of various 

 positions, who are constantly in attendance 

 upon her, and whom no male eye save his 

 Majesty's is ever permitted to see. Each of 

 these sets of houses is approached by its own 

 series of courtyards and dependent buildings. 



But perhaps the chief beauty of the spot lies 

 in the grounds, half gardens, half parks, which 



reduced to a convenient scale, or left of the 

 natural size, according to circumstances, and 

 introduced where he desires them to exist, but 

 are in no sense the conventional museum style 

 of arrangement we display in the fashioning 

 of our flower-gardens. Nothing would strike 

 them as more inartistic than a collection of 

 plants, however beautiful individually, arranged 

 in a manner so wholly unnatural. With them 

 such a collection can be seen, and can only be 

 seen, in the show-grounds of a florist, and 

 affects them as an ordinary shop-window does 

 us. In consequence, they more particularly 

 affect the flowering-shrubs to a comparative 

 neglect of the annuals. Perhaps nature has 

 aided them to the custom by producing the 



