class of readers. Okakura's Ideals of the East might be taken for Bostonian handiwork, but for the Japanese name on the title-page. We may also mention Nitobe's monograph on The Intercourse between the United States and Japan, Inagaki's Japan and the Pacific, Bunyiu Nanjio's Catalogue of the Buddhist Tripîtaka, and—though they have little relation to Japan—the so-called poems of Y. Noguchi, which have made a sensation (in California). Of works by early travellers, the copious Letters of the Jesuit Missionaries, the Letters of the English Pilot Will Adams, Kaempfer's History of Japan, and the elder Siebold's encyclopedic productions are the chief. But these are now mostly out of print, besides being out of date. Another excellent book, now difficult to obtain, is Hildreth's Japan as it Was and Is, in which the gist of what the various early travellers have left us concerning Japan is woven together into one continuous narrative, the exact text of the originals being adhered to as far as possible.
Botany. We have not the necessary space, even had we the necessary ability, to enter into a particular description of that rich and wonderful Japanese flora, which excites the imagination of the man of science as much as ever Japanese works of art in porcelain, bronze, and lacquer excited the imagination of the man of taste. We can only draw attention to a few striking facts and theoretical considerations, referring the reader for all details to Dr. Rein's masterly résumé of the subject, and to the works of Maximowicz, Savatier, Asa Gray, Sir Joseph Hooker, ltō Keisuke, and the other specialists whom Rein quotes.
The first impression made on any fairly observant person landing in Japan is the extraordinary variety of the vegetation. He sees the pine of the north flourishing by the side of the bamboo, or even of the tropical palmetto. A rice-field, as in India, stretches to his right; to his left will be a wheat or barley-field, reminding him of Europe; or else he is overshadowed by some giant camphor-laurel, the like of which grows only in Formosa. Equally unexpected juxtapositions occur wherever he
