The Peking custom in making large images, whether they are of brass, iron, wood, or clay, is to construct them with the internal organs as complete as possible. While the smaller images are filled with Thibetan incense or cotton wool, the larger have the interior arranged according to Chinese notions of anatomy. The heads are always empty. The chief viscera of the chest and abdomen are always represented. They are of silk or satin, and their shape is that found in drawings of the organs in native medical works. A round red piece of silk represents the heart, whose element is fire. It is the size of a dollar. It and the lungs, which are white, and divided into three lobes, are attached to a piece of wood, round which is wound a piece of yellow paper, having on it a Thibetan prayer. To the wood is attached, by silk threads of five colours, a metallic mirror called ming-king. This represents intelligence, the heart being regarded as the seat of mind. The lungs cover the heart as an umbrella or lid, as if to preserve it from injury.

In the abdomen the intestines are made of long narrow pieces of silk with cotton wool stitched along the concave border. This may represent fat or the mesentery. Embracing all, like the peritoneum, is a large piece of silk covered with prayers or charms. Inside are also to be found little bags containing the five kinds of grain, with pearls, jade, small ingots of silver, and gold of five candareens' weight, and bits of solder of various shapes to represent silver.

The larger and older idols have, in very many cases, been rifled of these little valuables, no one knows when. Poor priests in want of money, if the fear of sacrilege is

not strong in their minds, know where to get help, so that idols, in the interior of which gold and silver were once deposited, have now none. In the metallic images, the way to get to the inside is from the bottom. As they are very heavy, they have usually escaped being robbed. But the clay and wooden images are packed from a hole in the back, and are more liable to thievish depredation.

When the idols are set up there is a ceremony of consecration. The priests prostrate themselves before them, and a film of clay or some other substance is cleared away from the eyes of the idols. It is called the ceremony of opening to the light, and the day is spoken of as k'ai-kwang-ji-tsi.

I am indebted to Dr. Dudgeon for the preceding statement of the contents of Buddhist images in Peking.