power and glory. The work in
question was actually mistaken for a commentary on the _Book of
Changes_, mentioned in a former lecture, though it is in reality a
treatise upon alchemy, and also upon the concoction of pills of
immortality. It was forwarded to me some years ago by a gentleman in
America, with a request that I would translate it as a labour of love;
but I was obliged to decline what seemed to me a useless task,
especially as the book was really written by another man, of the same
name as the hermit, who lived more than twelve hundred years later.

The author is said to have ultimately succeeded in compounding these
pills of immortality, and to have administered one by way of experiment
to a dog, which at once fell down dead. He then swallowed one himself,
with the same result; whereupon his elder brother, with firm faith, and
undismayed by what he saw before him, swallowed a third pill. The same
fate overtook him, and this shook the confidence of a remaining younger
brother, who went off to make arrangements for burying the bodies. But
by the time he had returned the trio had recovered, and were straightway
enrolled among the ranks of the immortals.

As another instance of the rubbish in which the modern Taoist delights
to believe, I may quote the story of the Prince of Huai-nan, second
century B.C., who is said, after years of patient experiment, to have
finally discovered the elixir of life. Immediately on tasting the drug,
his body became imponderable, and he began to rise heavenward. Startled
probably by this new sensation, he dropped the cup out of which he had
been drinking, into the courtyard; whereupon his dogs and poultry
finished up the dregs, and were soon sailing up to heaven after him.

It was an easy transition from alchemy and the elixir of life to magic
and the black art in general. Those Taoists who, by their manner of
life, or their reputed successes in the above two fields of research,
attracted public attention, came to be regarded as magicians or wizards,
in communication with, and in control of, the unseen powers of darkness.
The accounts of their combats with evil spirits, to be found in many of
the lower-class novels, are eagerly devoured by the Chinese, who even
now frequently call in Taoist priests to exorcise some demon which is
supposed to be exerting an evil influence on the family.

As a specimen, there is a story of a young man who had fallen under the
influence of a beauti