In describing the effect of the dragon, the geomancers say he can remove the "spirit of death," the sha-ch'i, and preserve life. The sha is a malicious principle, the shed of the Hebrew and Arabic languages, and the ch'itgur of the Mongols. When this principle invades the body, man dies. They believe, however, that this enemy who kills and injures men is not invincible. The dragon has the power of checking it. It is curious to notice that here we have to do with impersonal yet living principles. The sha does not receive a proper name. In a Western country these superstitions would have been clothed in the language of a graceful mythology. The Chinese, belonging

altogether to a more primitive and prosaic type than the Greek race, are content with simply calling them good and evil principles.

I shall now say a few words on the professional names assumed by the geomancers. They call themselves professors of ti-li, "the doctrine or description of the earth," "geography." This name is in contrast with tien-wen, "astronomy," which means the description of heaven astronomically and astrologically, as ti-li geographically and geomantically is of earth.

What astrology is when compared with astronomy, such is geomancy when compared with geography. The astrological section in the geomancer's books is bulky. They tell us that the stars shining down (or coming down, for they suppose them movable) give the mountains their form. Some adopt the Hindoo nomenclature, and make the Sumeru mountain the centre of the mountain and river system of the world. Others, who object to offer su great a concession to the foreign doctrine of Buddhist books, prefer to assign this honour to Kwun-lun, the old Chinese name of the mountains dividing Thibet from Tartary. On the north side of these mountains, the Chinese probably resided for a time before proceeding to take possession of their present home, and the same chain has always taken a prominent place in their notions of geography. It is the backbone from which the other mountain chains proceed, and they form together a kind of terrestrial skeleton. The rivers form the veins and arteries, and the mountains the bones, of a living earth. The whole is imagined to be so like the heavens, that certain stars correspond to certain terrestrial spaces, and exercise rule over them. Kwun-lun rules the hills, as the Pole star rules the stars. When the geomancer takes his position to inspect a site for a grave, house, or city, he fixes upon a spot which is called hiue, a name that may be translated into English by, what are indeed possibly, its etymological equivalents, "hole" or "hollow." The