edecessor in the
Chinese chair during a period of over forty years' residence in China.
The result is an admirable selection of representative works, always in
good, and sometimes in rare, editions, covering the whole field of what
is most valuable in Chinese literature.

I now propose, with your approval, to give a slight sketch of the
Cambridge Library, in which I spend a portion of almost every day of
my life, and which I further venture to recommend as the type of that
collection which Columbia University should endeavour to place upon
her shelves.

The Chinese library at Cambridge consists of 4304 volumes, roughly
distributed under seven heads. These volumes, it should be stated, are
not the usual thin, paper-covered volumes of an ordinary Chinese work,
but they consist each of several of the original Chinese volumes bound
together in cloth or leather, lettered on the back, and standing on the
shelves, as our books do, instead of lying flat, as is the custom in
China.

Division A contains, first of all, the Confucian Canon, which now
consists of nine separate works.

There is the mystic _Book of Changes_, that is to say, the eight changes
or combinations which can be produced by a line and a broken line,
either one of which is repeated twice with the other, or three times by
itself.

--------- --- --- ---------
--------- --- --- --------- etc.
--- --- --------- ---------

These trigrams are said to have been copied from the back of a tortoise
by an ancient monarch, who doubled them into hexagrams, and so increased
the combinations to sixty-four, each one of which represents some active
or passive power in nature.

Confucius said that if he could devote fifty years to the study of this
work, he might come to be without great faults; but neither native nor
foreign scholars can really make anything out of it. Some regard it as a
Book of Fate. One erratic genius of the West has gone so far as to say
that it is only a vocabulary of the language of some old Central Asian
tribe.

We are on somewhat firmer ground with the _Book of History_, which is
a collection of very ancient historical documents, going back twenty
centuries B.C., arranged and edited by Confucius. These documents, mere
fragments as they are, give us glimpses of China's early civilisation,
centuries before the historical period, to which we shall come later on,
can fairly be said to begin.

Then we have t