11. The "Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan." Almost every subject interesting to the student of Japanese matters is treated of in the pages of these Transactions, which have, for more than thirty years past, been the favourite vehicle of publication for the researches of Satow, Aston, Gubbins, Blakiston, Pryer, Geerts, Batchelor, Troup, Wigmore, Knox, Florenz, Greene, Lloyd, and other eminent scholars and specialists. Of course the "Asiatic Transactions" are not light reading; their appeal is to the serious student.
12. "Descriptive and Historical Catalogue of Japanese and Chinese Paintings in the British Museum," by Wm. Anderson. Such a title does injustice to what is really an original and valuable book. Who would think of spending over £1 sterling on a catalogue? But this so-called catalogue is really a mine of information on numberless Japanese matters. To begin with, it gives a complete history of Japanese pictorial art. Then the author's painstaking research, with the assistance of Sir Ernest Satow, into the "motives" of this art—drawn, as they are, from the history of the country, from its religions, its superstitions, its literature, its famous sites—has shed a flood of light on these and many kindred subjects. Not that the book is easy reading, or meant to be read at all continuously. Still, the store of anecdotes which it contains will interest every person, who, when confronted by a Japanese picture or other work of art, prefers knowing what it is about to gaping at it ignorantly.
Where one has hundreds of books to choose from, such a list as the above might of course be indefinitely extended. Pearson's Flights Inside and Outside Paradise starts to our recollection at once as the book of all others to help to while away a rainy day at a tea-house. Miss Bird's (Mrs. Bishop's) Unbeaten Tracks in Japan is a capital description of Japanese travel in the "good old days" of a quarter of a century ago, her account of the Ainos being specially valuable. Rein's Japan, with its sequel The Industries of Japan, is an encyclopedic work now out of print and in some respects antiquated, but which should nevertheless, if
