Japanese? Our ignorance of the people whose trade we hope to win is disgraceful. Is it any wonder that native and alien do not see eye to eye? There are those who think "the yellow brain" abnormal, the Chinese a puzzle, the land a mystery. Yet those who are closest to the people in real fraternity and altruistic labour believe the Chinaman to be a normal man, capable of absorbing all the highest influences. They are one in their faith that China is yet to take her place in the sisterhood of nations and mightily influence for good the world at large. GEOGRAPHICAL CONQUESTS OF THE NINE THE TEENTH CENTURY BY LOUIS HEILPRIN HE third century after the discovery of America drew to its close with a veil of darkness still shrouding half the globe from the eye of civilised man. A Strabo or a Ptolemy, if questioned in 1800 as to how much of the earth's surface he could describe with accuracy, would have had to confess that he was quite familiar with only one of the grand divisions, and that one embracing only a tithe of the land of our planet. He might perhaps have claimed that he could make a tolerable map of South America, whose interior had been partly opened up by the zeal of the Jesuit missionaries. It would, however, have been full of great voids, representing regions unknown to him. He would have been able also to construct a map of Asia, approximately reproducing its main features, but his outlines would have been merely the frameworks of blurred and empty pictures. The Himalayas had not been measured — the Andes figuring as the highest mountains on the globe. There was a boundless area within the Chinese Empire untrodden by Europeans. In Asiatic Turkey, Persia, and in Afghanistan, in Turkestan, and the Pamir, there were whole regions removed from the ken of cartographers. Scant information existed regarding Japan, Farther India, and the Malay Archipelago; next to nothing was known about Korea, and the interior of Arabia was almost a blank. Australia was still floating as a cloud on the horizon. Most of the |