have cited this last only as a curiosity. For it has a strange history, and is not what it seems,--although the apparent motive was certainly suggested by some song like the one immediately preceding it. It is a song of loyalty, and was composed by Kido of Choshu, one of the leaders in that great movement which brought about the downfall of the Shogunate, the restoration of the Imperial power, the reconstruction of Japanese society, and the introduction and adoption of Western civilization. Kido, Saigo, and Okubo are rightly termed the three heroes of the restoration. While preparing his plans at Kyoto, in company with his friend Saigo, Kido composed

[1.

San-zen sekai no
Karasu wo koroshi
Nushi to soi-ne ga
Shite mitai!

]

and sang this song as an intimation of his real sentiments. By the phrase, "ravens of the three thousand worlds," he designated the Tokugawa partisans; by the word nushi (lord, or heart's-master) he signified the Emperor; and by the term soine (reposing together) he referred to the hoped-for condition of direct responsibility to the Throne, without further intervention of Shogun and daimyo. It was not the first example in Japanese history of the use of popular song as a medium for the utterance of opinions which, expressed in plainer language, would have invited assassination.

While I was writing the preceding note upon Kido's song, the Buddhist phrase, Sanzen sekai (twice occurring, as the reader will have observed, in the present collection), suggested a few reflections with which this paper may fitly conclude. I remember that when, I first attempted, years ago, to learn the outlines of Buddhist philosophy, one fact which particularly impressed me was the vastness of the Buddhist concept of the universe. Buddhism, as I read it, had not offered itself to

humanity as a saving creed for one inhabited world, but as the religion of "innumerable hundreds of thousands of myriads of kotis[1] of worlds." And the modern scientific revelation of stellar evolution and dissolution then seemed to me, and still seems, like a prodigious confirmation of certain Buddhist theories of cosmical law.

The man of science to-day cannot ignore the enormous suggestions of the new story that the heavens are telling. He finds himself compelled to regard the development of what we call mind as a general phase or incident in the ripening of planetary life throughout the universe. He is obliged to consider the relation of our own petty sphere to the great swarming of suns and systems as no more than the relation of a single noctiluca to the phosphorescence of a sea. By its creed the Oriental intellect has been better prepared than the Occidental to accept this tremendous revelation, not as a wisdom that increaseth sorrow, but as a wisdom to quicken faith. And I cannot but think that out of the certain future union of Western knowledge