otional, and Intellectual Characters

The physical characters of the Chinese are too well known to need
detailed recital. The original immigrants into North China all
belonged to blond races, but the modern Chinese have little left of
the immigrant stock. The oblique, almond-shaped eyes, with black iris
and the orbits far apart, have a vertical fold of skin over the inner
canthus, concealing a part of the iris, a peculiarity distinguishing
the eastern races of Asia from all other families of man. The stature
and weight of brain are generally below the average. The hair is black,
coarse, and cylindrical; the beard scanty or absent. The colour of
the skin is darker in the south than in the north.

Emotionally the Chinese are sober, industrious, of remarkable
endurance, grateful, courteous, and ceremonious, with a high sense
of mercantile honour, but timorous, cruel, unsympathetic, mendacious,
and libidinous.

Intellectually they were until recently, and to a large extent
still are, non-progressive, in bondage to uniformity and mechanism
in culture, imitative, unimaginative, torpid, indirect, suspicious,
and superstitious.

The character is being modified by intercourse with other peoples
of the earth and by the strong force of physical, intellectual,
and moral education.

Marriage in Early Times

Certain parts of the marriage ceremonial of China as now existing
indicate that the original form of marriage was by capture--of which,
indeed, there is evidence in the classical _Book of Odes_. But a
regular form of marriage (in reality a contract of sale) is shown
to have existed in the earliest historical times. The form was not
monogamous, though it seems soon to have assumed that of a qualified
monogamy consisting of one wife and one or more concubines, the
number of the latter being as a rule limited only by the means of the
husband. The higher the rank the larger was the number of concubines
and handmaids in addition to the wife proper, the palaces of the
kings and princes containing several hundreds of them. This form it
has retained to the present day, though associations now exist for
the abolition of concubinage. In early times, as well as throughout
the whole of Chinese history, concubinage was in fact universal,
and there is some evidence also of polyandry (which, however, cannot
have prevailed to any great extent). The age for marriage was twenty
for the man and fifteen for the girl, celibacy after thirty