at the same time not lacking a certain complexity,—a complexity indispensable if it is to become an object of interest and investigation to any scientific historian, the history of Japan should prove a very fascinating study. In this it resembles the relation many rare indigenous flora and fauna bear to foreign biologists. It should be noticed, however, that biologists may safely remain constant as regards their points of view, whatever plant or animal they happen to study, while historians ought always to bear in mind that every nation and every age has its own criterion. In the study of Japanese history the same truth must hold good. It is a very regrettable fact, however, that many foreign Japanologists are too fond of neglecting the Japanese point of view, and would like to apply the western standard to the things Japanese they encounter in their researches concerning our country. Frequently they are rash enough to criticise before they have a proper understanding of those things which it is their business to criticise. Sometimes they get at a truth to which Japanese scholars have never attained, but they almost as a rule forget that things Japanese too should be considered from many sides, as occidental things should necessarily be, and inflexibly adhere to that one line of insight which they were once fortunate enough to seize. Or sometimes they attack pitilessly those legendary parts of our history, which are to be found in some school text-books or are not yet entirely expunged from some more scholarly works, on account of a national reluctance to part with those cherished memories of our forefathers. They blame us as if no country in the world were chauvinistic except Japan, and Japan only. Such treatment of Japanese history, however, will avail them nothing at all, not to mention that we suffer very much in our outward relations from it. As chapter II. and the following, however, are chiefly devoted to the purpose of showing that the history of Japan may be interpreted side by side with that of many European nations, I will cease dwelling further on this topic, and will directly go over to the second point.

To consider Japanese history as a miniature of the world's history is rather a new assertion, so that it requires conclusive justification. It is now generally believed or assumed that every nation continues to evolve as an individual does, till it reaches its climax of growth and begins to decay. Hence many modern historians have successively tried to extract certain principles by the process of induction from kindred historical events which took place in different countries and ages, and thus to raise the study of history to the rank of a science in the same sense as that in which the word is used when we speak of natural phenomena. It is a great pity, however, that every historical event is of a very ephemeral nature, never to be repeated in exactly the same form in which it once occurred. And if it passes away, it passes away forever, not to be retarded in the midst of its course by the will of an investigator. Often one can contribute with full consciousness to the happening of an event, or can alter the course of it, but one cannot undo by any means the event itself and wash the ground as if nothing had taken place. Moreover, historical facts are very difficult to detach from their environment entirely, however isolated they seem to be, and on that account they are not fit to be made objects of laboratory experiments. In a school classroom the pupils are taught to solve an algebraic equation of a binomial expression by supposing the value of x and y alternately to be equal to zero. How much the task of historians would be lightened, if we could for some time trace the effect of a certain cause exclusively, setting at naught other concurrent causes, as if those causes might be supposed to be standing still for a moment of observation or hypothetically cancelled for a necessary time!

Strictly speaking, the above device is out of the question in the case of any historical investigation. Setting that aside, there is still another greater difficulty to encounter in the study of history. Every school-boy knows that there is a fundamental law in physics, that when a body is set in motion by a certain impetus, it will move on continuously in one direction with the same momentum, so long as it is left uninfluenced by any other new force. It is true, however, that such a case exists very rarely even in natural phenomena, and it would be quite absurd to look for the like in the domain of history. More than one cause acts conjointly upon individuals, families, tribes, or nations, and before those causes cease to influence, other new causes generally come into play, so that the influences of the latter are interwoven with those of the former causes or groups of causes, and make discrimination between them exceedingly difficult.

Summing up the above, one cannot entirely isolate a country from its surroundings, in order to see what a country or a nation would be able to achieve, if untouched by any outward influence, that is to say, solely out of its own immanent evolving forces. Next, it is none the less difficult to observe scientifically the effects of some outward forces acting on a nation, by warding off the influx of subsequent influences and thus giving to the forces in question the full scope and time to exert their influence. It often happens, however, that what cannot be done artificially may be found produced spontaneously, and though we cannot make experiments, in the strict sense of the word, while observing historical data, it is possible that the history of a nation or of an age may be taken as a case or a phase of an experiment, if such an experiment could ever be tried at all. And indeed the history of Japan may be considered as one of a few such happy cases.

Here I need not talk much about the history of our country anterior to the introduction of the Chinese civilisation. After the opening of the regular intercourse between this country and China in the beginning of the seventh century, institutions, arts, learning, and even the manners of every day life continued for a long time to be brought thence by many official emissaries and students, and copied faithfully here, though generally with slight modifications. At that time, however, there being no country far advanced in civilisation other than China near us, the Chinese influence, the only exotic one, was allowed to take sole and full effect. Besides this, that Chinese civilisation itself was not encouraged to flow in endlessly. When, with the decay of the T'ang dynasty and the setting in of the anarchical condition following it in China, the highly finished culture attained during that dynasty, perhaps the most perfect one China had ever seen, began to degenerate there, the official intercourse between that country and Japan was interrupted. Of course, I do not mean to say that even private and intermittent commercial intercourse was also suspended at the same time, for the geographical position of our country toward China does not allow the former to remain entirely isolated from the latter. The suspension of the regular intercourse itself, however, was enough to save Japan from becoming entangled in the vicissitudes of the various dynasties following the T'ang, and our forefathers were left to themselves to make the best use of, that is to say, to digest, what had already been brought in abundantly. In the succeeding period the quiet process of rumination went on for several centuries. If we look back into the Japanese history of that time, therefore, we can ascertain fairly scientifically the effect of a high civilisation acting on a naïve population not yet sufficiently