three seconds" or "35° 41’ 23’’," "pounds, shillings, and pence" or "£ s. d.?" Doubtless an ideographic system of writing is in finitely more cumbrous as a whole than its rival; but it is easier in each particular case. Hence its victory. We commend these considerations—for additional proof or for disproof—to those who have always been taught to believe, not merely that an alphabet is the ne plus ultra of perfection, but that it is a thing needing only to be known in order to be adopted.
Book recommended. A Practical Introduction to the Study of Japanese Writing (Mojo no Shirube), by B. H. Chamberlain.
Yezo, often incorrectly spelt Yesso, and officially styled the Hokkaido, or " Northern Sea Circuit," is the northernmost of the large islands that form the Japanese archipelago. It lies, roughly speaking, between parallels 41½° and 45½° of north latitude—the latitude of that part of Italy which stretches from Rome to Venice;—but it is under snow and ice for nearly half the year, the native Ainos tracking the bear and deer across its frozen and pathless mountains, like the cave-men of the glacial age of Europe. It is asserted that Yoshitsune, the great Japanese hero, fled into Yezo and died there; but little attempt was made by the Japanese to colonise it until early in the seventeenth century, when the Shōgun Ieyasu granted it as a fief to one Matsumae Yoshihiro, who conquered the south-western corner of the island, establishing his capital at Matsumae, some sixty miles to the south-west of the modern port of Hakodate. His successors retained their sway over Yezo until the recent break-up of the feudal system. They treated the luckless Ainos with great cruelty, and actually rendered it penal to communicate to these poor barbarians the art of writing or any of the arts of civilised life. Frequent rebellions, suppressed by massacres, were the result. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, however, and in the first half of the nineteenth, a few Japanese literati made their way into the island. It is to their efforts—to the efforts of such men as Mogami, Mamiya, and Matsura—that our first scientific
