A rigorous restriction of space in the Journal, which to the editor has all the virtues of necessity, and to the contributor most of the features of calamity, confines me to a few lines of preliminary matter. I should have wished to explain the use in these papers of the words “ ideogram ” and “ ideographic ”, but I cannot. I should also have liked to include entries on the important characters yin and yany of the dualistic system, which occur in my own collection of Honan relics, but are unknown to either Lo Chên-yü or Wang Hsiang, but this too is impossible. Let us therefore proceed to business.