A question has often presented itself to my mind with regard to the kitchen middens as proof of antiquity. It is this. These pots, jars and cups are made of sun-dried clay, not burnt. I cannot think that sun-dried vessels could last under ground in a damp climate such as this of Yezo for many hundreds of years. Surely the frost and dampness would tend towards their rapid resolution into the soil.
In the Journal of the Anthropological Society for May, 1881, Prof. J. Milne published a paper read by himself in 1879 before the British Association in which he gave it as his opinion that “the kitchen-middens and other spoor of the early inhabitants of Japan were in all probability the traces of the Ainu, who at one time, as is indicated by written history, populated a large portion of this country.” Later, in another paper published in Vol. VIII., Part I. of the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, entitled "Notes on Stone Implements from Otaru and Hakodate, with a few General Remarks on the Prehistoric Remains of Japan,” he also shows that these remains extend through Yezo and the Kurile Islands. Prof. Milne may therefore well be reckoned as another independent witness supporting what has been said in the above paragraphs.
But then Fourthly there are the Place-names. Yet even these must be given up. In the Memoirs mentioned abeve Prof. Chamberlain catalogues 210 real native names out of which the meanings for 99 only could then be supplied. Well then might the Professor ask—“Why should not some have descended from the aborigines who preceded the Ainus, the latter adopting them as the Japanese have adopted Ainu names?” But this was in the year 1887 when our knowledge of the Ainu tongue was only just beginning. At that time I could have asked the very same question; indeed, if I remember rightly, Professor Chamberlain and I did talk the matter over together at Horobetsu just before the memoirs were published. Since then some progress has been made in these studies, and I can no longer ask such a question. I have studied Mr. Chamberlain's list very carefully on the spot with the Ainu, the result being that the real root meanings of
