near coming into conflict with Russia over the question of Korea. The Iwakura embassy had come back from Europe much impressed with the military activity of the Powers, but, above all, with the aggressive policy and attitude of Russia. In a report Tashimichi pointed out that Russia, perpetually pressing southwards, was now the chief peril for Japan, and, as a result, it became immediately the first object of Japanese policy to check Russia in Korea. As the best way of effecting this, many in the Government were for declaring war immediately against Russia, and complete plans were formed for the conquest and occupation of Korea. But the prudent majority recognised that the time had not yet come for trying conclusions with Russia, and they carried their point. They said they might, and would, win by waiting until they had completed their preparations, but that it was premature to take on such a big risk as that of a war with one of the European Powers. From that time, however, the idea was implanted in the Japanese mind that sooner or later they would have to fight Russia. The war with China was a sort of trial trip-eminently satisfactory in so far as it proved that they had mastered the use of Western weapons, and modified their mode of military operations in conformity with the best modern ideas. It was intensely mortifying to the entire nation that they should have suffered defeat in the diplomatic field, and that, against all principles of justice, they should see Port Arthur, the legitimate reward of their victory, taken from them by a nefarious conspiracy of the foreign Powers-again emphasising to their minds the menace of the White Peril. The part they took in the expedition to the relief of the legations at Peking in 1900, a sort of international military parade, was sufficient to show us who accompanied it to what a high state of efficiency the Japanese troops had been trained. I was in Japan a year before the outbreak of the present war, and there were abundant signs that the nation was preparing, and girding up its loins for the great struggle which was impending, and the imminence of which they made little secret of admitting. I left Japan with the impression that war was inevitable, and that the outbreak of hostilities was merely a matter of a few months; but, as it takes two to make a quarrel, this opinion was somewhat modified, during my return home via Siberia and Russia, by finding there was practically a unanimous opinion amongst Russians of all classes that there would be no war, and that the game they were playing in the Far East was merely one of bluff. They bluffed just a little too much, however, and, in the language of the game of poker, their hand was called.

When the first shots were fired upon the Variag and Koritz in Chemulpo harbour, they were really something more than a declaration of war against Russia: they were, in a sense, replying to the guns of that pirate Perry, to those that had bombarded Shimonoseki, and to

those that had reduced the forts of Kagoshima. It was the Asiatics, after long preparation, taking up arms to stem the aggression of the West; and at last the White Peril was to be faced and fought. The events of the past year have shown that the Japanese did not overestimate their strength or their resources; and, notwithstanding the element of uncertainty at the time of writing, introduced by the very able manner in which Admiral Rodjesvenski has succeeded in bringing his miscellaneous fleet into Eastern waters, there can be little doubt as to what will be the final result of the war. If the Russians continue the struggle, it will be only a matter of time for Vladivostok to share the same fate as Port Arthur, and for the Russians to be driven beyond Harbin.

There is little doubt that one of the conditions of peace will be the evacuation of Manchuria by Russia, and the return of the island of Saghalien to Japan. Already the effects of the war have become apparent throughout China, and a fresh impetus has been given to the movement of what I have called the Japanisation of that country. During the past twelve months an unprecedented number of Chinese students have come to Japan-there are now over four thousand in Tokio alone, while Great Britain, with its enormous trade with China, can only number eighty student visitors. While considerable importance may be attached to the influence these young men will have when they return home, an equal influence is being already exercised in China by the large number of Japanese instructors who have gone over to direct the reorganisation of the army and navy, and act as superintendents in the Government arsenals. Notwithstanding the war being in progress, there has been a remarkable increase in Japan's trade with China during the past twelve months, which is indicative of the rapid expansion which is certain to take place at the conclusion of the war. In return for the restoration of Manchuria, the Japanese look to getting railway and mining concessions throughout Fokien, their sphere of influence opposite Formosa.

Unquestionably one of the results of the war will be the drawing of the two Asiatic empires more closely together; and as soon as the development of China will make her more valuable as an ally we shall probably see an offensive and defensive alliance concluded with Japan. It is obvious that the time has come when no further territory in Eastern Asia can be annexed by European Powers, and it is not by any means improbable that before long a movement in the opposite direction may begin. Now that the Russians have been driven out of Port Arthur, we will soon be under notice to quit Wai-Hai-Wai. If for any reason Japan should pick a quarrel with Germany, and insist on their evacuating Kiao-Chou, it is difficult to see what effective opposition the Germans could make. Very much the same applies to France in the case of Cochin China. The menace of the White Peril is passing away, if it has not already passed, from

Eastern Asia. The Monroe doctrine of the Pacific, if it has not been announced in so many words, exists as a reality in the minds of hundreds of thousands of Asiatics. There will be many who will find in this confirmation for their worst fears of the Yellow Peril. M. Anatole France says:

Aussitôt nous discernons un danger qui nous menace. S'il existe, qui l'a créé ? Ce ne sont pas les Japonais qui sont venus chercher les Russes. Ce ne sont pas les jaunes qui sont venus chercher les blancs. Nous découvrons, à cette heure, le péril jaune. Il y a bien des années que les Asiatiques connaissent le péril blanc. Le sac du Palais d'Été, les massacres de Pékin, les noyades de Blagovetchensk, le démembrement de la Chine, n'étais-ce point là des sujets d'inquiétude pour les Chinois ? Et les Japonais se sentaient-ils en sûreté sous les canons de Port-Arthur? Nous avons créé le péril blanc. Le péril blanc a créé le péril jaune..

As the White has created the Yellow Peril, so will the passing of the White Peril lay the ghost of the other. To anyone really familiar with the peaceful character of the Chinese people, and conversant with their history, the idea of their ever becoming aggressively warlike is thoroughly absurd. It would certainly mean a radical and fundamental change in the whole disposition of the people, and the Chinese are not prone to change.

GEORGE LYNCH.

VOL. LVII-No. 340

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THE foundation of an Ethological Society in London should be a matter for general congratulation. In fact, seeing that most people have probably always been very much of Pope's opinion that the proper study of mankind is man,' it is rather singular that we should have had to wait until the twentieth century for the establishment of any society having for its object the systematic study of human character. But now that we have a society calling itself' Ethological,' and numbering among its vice-presidents distinguished men of letters and of science, novelists, dramatists, lawyers, doctors, schoolmasters, prison governors, and other practical experts in human nature, it is certainly equally singular that this society should apparently be founded on a ' phrenological' basis. At any rate, there are two points in connection with this society calling itself Ethological which should be relieved of all ambiguity. In the first place, it ought to be made clear whether the ethology of the Ethological Society is or is not the ethology of John Stuart Mill, who coined that word as an appropriate term for a new science which he himself hoped to be able to create, and the limitations of which he very precisely defined in the sixth book of his Logic. To me it appears to be another thing altogether. The new science which Mill proposed to name ethology was something quite different from psychology-whether individual, ethnical, or comparative. As conceived by him, it was to stand to psychology in a relation very similar to that in which the various branches of natural philosophy stand to mechanics.' In fact, ethology, the deductive science, was to be a system of corollaries from psychology, the experimental science. It would never enable us to predict the actions of individuals with scientific accuracy; but Mill held that that which was only probable when asserted of individual human beings indiscriminately selected, might be regarded as certain when affirmed of the character and collective conduct of masses. Individual character he conceived to be far too complicated a matter to be similarly dealt with. He points out that there is hardly any living person concerning some essential part of whose character there are not differences of

opinion even among his intimate acquaintances. So numerous and various, too, are the circumstances which form individual character that not only is the aggregate never in any two cases exactly similar, but what we obtain, after the most extensive and accurate observation, is only an approximative result. The consequence of any particular combination, also, is hardly ever some definite and strongly marked character, always found where that combination exists, and not otherwise. Moreover-and this brings me to my second point-Mill was distinctly of opinion that 'whatever may hereafter be found to be the true theory of this subject, phrenology at least is untenable.'

In the second place, then, it ought to be made equally clear whether or not the aims and objects of the new society are in any way bound up with the more or less well-known and peculiar views of its President, Dr. Bernard Holländer, as expounded in his books on The Mental Functions of the Brain and on Scientific Phrenology. Dr. Holländer, it is true, expressly dissociates himself from the modern professors of the bump theory'; but he contends that the new phrenology, while it can have nothing to do with these ignorant quacks, must nevertheless hark back to the founders of the old phrenology, Drs. Gall and Spurzheim. It may be well, therefore, to state briefly what was the pure and unadulterated theory originally propounded by these ingenious gentlemen.

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Before doing this, however, it may be worth while to remind ourselves that just as there were poets before Homer, and tall men before Agamemnon, so there were phrenologists before Gall and Spurzheim. Pythagoras and Democritus placed sensitive and vegetative life in the blood, but mind in the head. Plato placed the passions in the viscera, but the reason in the brain. Aristotle pronounced the first or anterior ventricle of the brain to be the organ of common sense, the second or central ventricle to be the region of reflection and judgment, and the third or posterior ventricle to be the region of memory. Coming down to the fourteenth century, we find Mundini, of Luzzi, supposing the existence of 'cellules' in the brain, each the seat of a different mental faculty. And, about the middle of the seventeenth century, Willis, of Oxford, propounded a more detailed theory which might well entitle him to be described as the 'father of phrenology.' It may go without the saying that he did not (and in his age could not) really know very much about the brain. But he held that the cerebrum was the organ of the animal functions and the voluntary motions, that the understanding was seated in the corpus callosum, that the 'animal spirits' were generated in the cerebrum and cerebellum and collected in the medulla, that the convolutions were the storehouses of memory, and that the soul was located in a lymphatic gland. Prochaska, who wrote a history of previous theories of the subject in 1784, sensibly and candidly declared that, up to that date, it had not been possible to determine what portions of the cerebrum or the