A glance At the railway map of Japan will show that the country is criss-crossed by a network of railroads. Trunk lines run along almost the entire coast line of both Honshu and Kyushu. These and several other main lines running north and south are connected by numerous cross-connecting lines. Today all of the important cities are linked by rail.

The museum has acquired from the Hester Collection in Chicago 410 pieces of Chinese and Siamese ceramics from the group collected by Mr. Hester in the Philippines. All are whole pieces and this accession rounds out and supplements in many ways the already important body of material brought by the University of Michigan Philippine Expedition of 1922–25.

The accession to power of the Kuomintang in 1927–1928 marked the end of the era in which revolutionary strains had been dominant in the party's program and the beginning of one of the most interesting and instructive of the many efforts in history to make a revolution the heir of ancient tradition. The Kuomintang effort was noteworthy for four reasons: (1) the rapidity with which its course was reversed; (2) the magnitude of the gulf between the Confucian political and social system which the Kuomintang sought to restore and the national and social revolution which the party had lately led to victory; (3) the full and uninhibited adherence of Chiang Kai-shek and other leaders not only to the values of the traditional society but to the specific institutions in which these had been embodied; and (4) a well-documented, persistent and selfconscious effort on the part of these leaders to win the competition with the Communists by detailed application in the mid-twentieth century of precisely the means which the Imperial Chinese Government had applied against the Taiping Rebellion in the mid-nineteenth.

As was true of many other fields of learning in Japan, Chinese studies entered a new stage of development with the Meiji era. The valuable tradition of kangaku (“Chinese learning” of the Tokugawa period) was affected and, to a degree, replaced, by Western scientific methods of inquiry.

As of July 30, 1953, the Chinese People's Republic conducted a census in preparation for nation wide elections. Extensive publicity described this as the most complete census ever undertaken in China, but critical evaluation is impossible. Since the totals are more than 100 million larger than any previous estimates, they must be regarded with considerable reserve. The details were announced by the Statistical Bureau on Nov. 1, 1954. Over 2,500,000 census enumerators were employed. A recheck was made on 9 per cent of the population, covering 52,915,000 people and showed duplications amounting to 1/10 of 1 per cent and omissions of 2/10 of 1 per cent.

The perennially fascinating problem of translating Chinese into Western languages (or vice versa) has evoked considerable discussion in recent years. My excuse for adding to it here is that Professor Boodberg, in his review (see foregoing note) of my translation of Fung Yu-lan's History of Chinese Philosophy, has raised questions which, while addressed specifically to my rendering of certain Chinese philosophic terms, at the same time bear importantly on the larger problems of Chinese translation as a whole. In the following pages, therefore, I shall begin by commenting—I trust in a spirit of friendly discussion—on what Professor Boodberg has said about these terms (indicating in parentheses for each of them the English equivalents used by me in my translation, the two volumes of which will hereafter be cited as Fung 1 and 2). Then, using some of these as illustrations, I shall comment on the theories of translation presented by Professor Boodberg in his own article on “semasiology,” as well as that by Professor Schafer on “two sinological maladies” (both cited in note 1 above). And having done this, I shall finally try to formulate a few general conclusions of my own.

After thirty years in obscurity a complete manuscript of San Min Chu I corrected by Sun Yat-sen has been brought to light by Dr. Lo Chia-lun, chairman of the Historical Commission of the Kuomintang. A careful textual comparison with the published version in use since 1924 reveals significant discrepancies of a theoretical nature, chief of which concerns Sun's widely quoted comparison of min sheng or “people's livelihood” with socialism and communism.

Leading characters in this novel are “Zhamtso,” head of the Mongolian Scientific Committee; “Andreἴ Makarovich Turanov,” a Russian geographer, “Roy Webster,” leader of an American expedition in the Gobi Desert; and “Nakamura,” a Japanese officer spying in Outer Mongolia. These thinly-disguised names may be penetrated as: Tsyben Zhamtsaranovich Zhamtsarano (1880–1940?), founder of the Mongolian Scientific Committee and its “perpetual secretary”; Eduard Makarovich Murzaev, a prominent Soviet geographer and author of a Stalin Prize-winning physical geography of the Mongolian People's Republic (Outer Mongolia); Roy Chapman Andrews, leader of the Central Asiatic Expedition of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, director of the Museum for many years, now living in California; “Nakamura” is not identifiable under this or any other name.