judgment reasonably in favour of the opinion of the native commentators in regard to I hi wei, that the three words have each a meaning of its own, and that they each express some difference in the operations of Tau. This however does not prevent their being also foreign words, though it may render the hypothesis of foreign origin less essential to a fair understanding of the author's meaning.

3.-The author proceeds by saying, "Therefore Tau is great, heaven is great, earth is great, the king also is great. Man copies earth, earth copies heaven and heaven copies Tau.”

Heaven, earth and man, (or the king,) appear here to the author as a sort of visible Trinity, in imitation of the invisible Trinity of which he has glimpses, embraced in the divine principle on which the material universe rests.

4.-When about half through the treatise, Lau tsï says, "Tau produced one. One produced two. Two produced three. Three produced all things. All things support the Yin principle, and embrace the Yang principle. They contain a vapour whieh produces harmony."

The trinity here contemplated by the author is one of evolution. One is the source of two and two of three. This must be kept in view while we endeavour to learn just what he thought.

As in the words I, hi, wei, we have a Trinity of coordinate qualities, so here we have a cosmogonical Trinity of evolution.

The above four examples of a sort of Trinity more or less distinct, sufficiently shew that whencesoever Lau tsï derived his philosophy, he felt a strong tendency to conceive of that Tau which he made the subject of his book as spontaneously assuming a triple shape. This triplicity of shape appeared to him to be evolutionary and anterior to the creation of the universe. His Trinity proceeded from a primal unity by two distinct steps of development, and when the Trinity was thus complete in itself, the creation of the universe followed as a third step in the evolution. This however does not prevent his viewing the three factors in his Trinity as coordinate.

Having proceeded thus far we may be prepared to consider the question from what foreign country or countries, Lau tsï was most likely to receive the idea of a Trinity. Was it from the Jews, the Babylonians or the Hindoos?

Before attempting to answer this question directly, it will be necessary to learn what we can respecting the ancient pronunciation of the characters I, hi, wei, so that we may know what they were called in the days of the author of the book.

They are all in the fifteenth class of Twan yu ts'ai. That is to say they all rhymed together in the poetry of the Odes, of the Yi

king, of the Ch'u ts'ï, of the Tso chwen and of the Kwo yü. The words which rhymed with them, and are also found in the fifteenth class of Twan's rhymes, are such as 帥,私,衣,旨,非,幾,示,貴,利, HE, all then pronounced in the p'ing shêng.

Among the words so rhyming I find H, used in spelling Bikshu, in Manjusiri, in Manjusiri Shari putra, in Nirvana. All these occur in a work translated by Hindoo Buddhists residing at Lo yang in China about A. D. 69. Hence the vowel i is known to have been pronounced in these words at that time. The character, was also used still earlier to write the Persian word shir, lion, which then became known to the Chinese about the second century before Christ.

By this method we learn the final vowel and may then look in the Kwang Yün, F, rhyme six,, for the initials of the three words as they were read in the seventh century. has a vowel initial, the syllabic spelling being, which gives us the lower y, or old F. The other two characters, and, are in the eighth rhyme,, probably called mei. The fantsie is in the one case, and in the other. For the initial of, we find, in Julien's Methode, that it is used to spell mo in Mokcha, ma in Dharmarakcha Dharmagoupta, mo in Namo. Thus the initial m may be considered as having anciently belonged without doubt to both 無 and微

By this process of proof it may be regarded as known that I hi mi was the sound of the characters in the sixth (and seventh) century after Christ.

The question now recurs from what people did the idea of a Trinity and a cosmogony come to China. The best answer seems to be the Babylonians. The three great gods, corresponding to heaven, earth, and the abyss, were among the Babylonians, Anna, Hea and Moulge. These were among the Accadians the greatest of the gods; among the Chaldeans they became Anna, Nouah and Bel. If this notion be correct Anna is, Hea is, Moulge ismi. Lenormant says, the supreme god, the first and only principle in the Babylonian religion, was Ilu, in Accadian Dingira. This was the One God in the philosophical language of sacerdotal schools in a rather late period. For a long time the personality of Ilu was not distinctly perceived. The rôle and qualification of the One God were first given to Anu the personage in the Supreme Triad that was regarded as having emanated from Ilu. At one time emanation was formally attributed to the persons in the Triad and at another time not. In Assyria special importance was given to the doctrine that there was the supreme God from whom the others all emanated. Beneath Ilu was a triad consisting of Anu, primordial chaos,

uncreated matter, Nuah, will or word, which animates matter and renders the universe fruitful and living, and Bel the demiurge, ruler of the world. After this first triad which represented the genesis of the material world, and regarded it as having emanated from the substance of the divine being, the series of emanations continued and a second triad was produced; Sin the moon, Sumas the sun, and Bin, god of the atmosphere who controls wind, rain and thunder.

It is the former of these triads that Lau tsï appears to have known. He knew them not by the Semitic names but as I Hi, Hia and Mulge. Later Tauists also knew the second triad and hence we have the San kwan, E. The San ts'ing,, is a Tauist triad evidently made on the western model to find a place for Lau tsï who as the third in that trinity is supposed to be a historical incarnation. In him the divine became a man for the instruction of China.

It was possible, but not very likely, that Lau tsi worked out the evolutionary cosmogony for himself without foreign ideas to aid him. To me it is much more likely that ideas came to him from the west. In Lie tsï who lived a century or more after him we find a sort of Persian Magician working marvels, and the west is represented as the land of the sages. In Lie tsï the cosmogony on a principle of emanation is more fully set forth than in Lau tsi, who is described as going on a journey to the west after leaving behind with a friend the manuscript of the Tau te king.

The argument for a Babylonian origin to Lau tsï's trinity is thus threefold. 1. The pronunciation of the words I hi wei. 2. The cosmogony on the principle of evolution. 3. The strong support afforded by the work of Lie tsi, the first among Lau tsï's disciples to write a book still extant.

It should be noted also that western knowledge on Tau,, the Chaldean Nuah, and Greek λoyos, might come to Lau tsï not only by the Central Asian route, which the passages in Lie tsï favour, but also by South China the Ch'u country, which became affected by Hindoo ideas and usages, coming in by Yunnan and the other provinces on the south.

I have only to add that in the circumstances of the whole question in dispute as here given we seem not to need the hypothesis that Lau tsï knew the name Jehovah or the Hebrew scriptures. But as to whether the philosopher derived knowledge from India it is quite possible that he did so. In his time Babylonian astronomy, astrology, cosmography and cosmogony, were probably spread much more widely in India than in China. But they had not at that date assumed a decided Hindoo shape. They passed through India and beyond it in a form which was still Babylonian.

ANOTHER SMALL STEP IN ADVANCE.

BY E. H. PARKER, ESQ.

IF reference be made to a paper on the Foochow dialect, published

in the China Review, Vol. IX, Page 65, it will be observed that, in the dialect of Foochow, the fact that a word is in the departing tone [#] alters the innate "quantity" or vocalizibility of that word's vowel. For instance, the character, has power ing or eing according as it is read in the even or in the departing tone. So the power ei, ö, u, &c., in the even tones becomes the power ai, aö, ou, &c., in the departing tones.*

Accordingly, the following words were written, in reference to this peculiarity, six or seven years ago :-"We think this fact "may throw light upon the question which are the standard "sounds; the or 'simple,' or the , or compound,' assuming "that both are not equally ancient. This question we leave for "the present unanswerable."

In another passage towards the close of the same article, it was pointed out that the first thing to be done in Chinese philology was to reduce the leading Chinese dialects to one common standard of spelling, in order to compare them scientifically one with the other, and it was added:-" When all this shall have been done, "we may fairly cast about for light amongst the Corean, Japanese, "Annamese, and other languages, and perhaps even plunge into "Sanskrit."

Since those lines were written, various Chinese dialects have been examined and tabulated, and reduced to one common denominator in the shape of Sir Thomas Wade's system. The Canton, Hakka, Foochow, Wênchow, Ningpo, Hankow, Yangchow and Sz ch'uan dialects are all to be found in the China Review, expressed in Sir Thomas Wade's Peking way, except in so far may have been necessary to add new vowels to Sir Thomas Wade's store, and remedy for philological purposes, one or two impracticable defects in his system. A diffident plunge into Sanskrit has been duly made; and though, owing to the but too moderate skill of the diver, no great depth has yet been attained,

as it

In English "I will" or "I wull" becomes "I won't;" I do or "I du" becomes "I don't;" "I am," or "I isn't" becomes "I eint," or "aint; " I "can and shall" become "I can't and shan't;" so that the Foochow peculiarity is not a pure novelty.

and no startling philological novelties fished up, it has been shewn pretty conclusively in the Chinese Recorder that any connection which Sanskrit may have with Chinese is not immediate, but must if it exists, be referred to some common origin in the misty distance of the past, long before the Aryans marched into India, and long before the Chinaman groped his way along the Yellow River into modern China.

As to Annamese, M. Landes, Administrator of Native Affairs at Saigon, has been good enough to furnish the writer with a dictionary of Annam-Chinese, and to explain some of its peculiarities; but no comparative work except that done on the spot can be of first class value, and consequently Annamese awaits a dissector.

As foreshadowed in a paper entitled Corean Japanese and Chinese, published in the China Review for January-February 1886, "by the light of Corean and Japanese many obscurities in Chinese "development may be cleared up," and "Chinese is a powerful "lever by which it is possible to lay bare many a mystery in the "development of Corean and Japanese."

The Grammaire Coréenne, Page XI, says :-"Il y a des voyelles "et des diphthongues brèves, et d'autres longues. L'usage seul "peut les faire reconnaître, car aucun signe ne les distingue dans "l'écriture." It is remarkable that all the simple vowels in Corean, as well as most, if not all, of the compound vowels or diphthongs, have a long as well as a short form. Thus there is the long a as in father; the short a as in man (pronouced in broad Scotch style, or as in the German Mann): the long i, as the vowel in the English word peat; and the short i almost as short (but not quite) as in the English word pit, but exactly the same is in the Cantonese pit "a pencil." So with the long and short o, which has two sounds, one as in the English word tone, and one as in the first part of the French word tonneau; and so with the u, which has the two sounds of the vowels in the English words fool and foot. Great confusion is caused to students of Corean by the fact that the three remaining vowels ǎ, ï, and é, are often interchanged one with the other. The vowel which is here written ê, is written by the French missionaries e, and by Mr. Aston and Mr. Chamberlain ö. Fortunately, we have at least one Chinese dialect which precisely hits off both the long and the short form of ê. The Pekingese ch'è, [], "a cart," is pronounced intermediately between the English [車], words "chaw" and "chair," and it is impossible on paper to describe it more accurately. This is the long Corean é, [i.e. e or ö.]