Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 137.pdf/459

448 flanking movement across the Tian Shan which sealed the fate of Aksu. The division with which Kin Tang had executed his brilliant feat of arms was not, it should be remembered, the only Chinese army operating in the field. There was another and a larger force north of the Tian Shan, with its base at Manas, which was under the immediate command of Tso Tsung Tang, and it was the sudden appearance of this army north of Aksu which paralyzed all the preparations Kuli Beg had for three months been making. Early in November, Aksu surrendered, through the treachery of its governor, — that is to say, he thought a timely discretion the better part of valor; and later on in the same month, Ush Turfan (New Turfan), eighty miles nearer to the capital, fell also into the hands of the Chinese. The joint armies of Tso Tsung and Kin Tang pressed on against Kashgar itself, and after winning a battle underneath its walls, in which Kuli Beg was wounded, the capital of the dominions of the late Athalik Ghazi once more was,entered by a conquering army from far distant China. Since then Yarkand and Khoten — in the telegrams misspelt "Khokand" — have either been occupied by, or have voluntarily acknowledged, the Chinese, and may by such timely allegiance have diverted from themselves some of that wrath which has been so manifested towards the other cities.

Such, briefly narrated, is the story of the Chinese reconquest of eastern Turkestan, and we think that no one will dispute the fact that, both in strategy among their generals and in endurance and courage among their men, this Chinese army has done much to revindicate the old and long lost prestige which attached to the soldiers of Kanghi and Keen Lung. We will say nothing here of the future, although there is the prospect of a war in this region between Russia and China for the possession of Kuldja, or of an arrangement between those powers of the difficulty, by a further advance of the Russian dominions in Manchooria, in exchange for the retrocession of Kuldja. Whichever be the solution of what at present appears to be no slight danger, the result must be interesting to us; but in order to comprehend the future ramifications of this intricate business, it is very necessary that the campaign just ended should be first mastered. With that object in view, we have placed the preceding description of it before our readers.

 

  — The Japanese habit of reversing everything, if we may regard our own way of doing as the proper way, is very curious, and in some of its details very interesting. Mr. Griffiths, in his work on Japan, discusses it thus: "Another man is planing. He pulls the plane towards him. I notice a blacksmith at work. He pulls the bellows with his feet, while he is holding and hammering with both hands. He has several irons in the fire, and keeps his dinner pot boiling with the waste flame. His whole family, like the generations before them, seem to get their living in the hardware line. The cooper holds his tubs with his toes. All of them sit down while they work. Perhaps that is an important difference between a European and an Asiatic. One sits down to his work, the other stands up to it. Why is it that we do things contrariwise to the Japanese? Are we upside down, or they? The Japanese say that we are reversed. They call our penmanship "crab writing," because, say they, "it goes backward." The lines in our books cross the page like a crawfish, instead of going downward properly. In a Japanese stable we find the horse's flank where we look for his head. Japanese screws screw the other way. Their locks thrust to the left, ours to the right. The baby toys of the Aryan race squeak when they are squeezed; the Turanian gimcracks emit noise when pulled apart. A Caucasian, to injure his enemy, kills him; a Japanese kills himself to spite his foe. Which race is left-handed? Which has the negative, which the positive of truth? What is truth? What is down? What is up?"

 

  — A. Strumpell (Pflüger's Archiv) reports the case of a patient, aged sixteen, the whole of whose cutaneous surface was completely insensible, so that the strongest stimuli applied to the skin did not excite any expression of pain. A similar anaesthesia was shown in nearly all the accessible mucous membranes of the body, and muscular sensibility was completely wanting. In addition to this, there was a complete loss of smell and taste. Finally, the right eye was amaurotic, and the left ear deaf; so that, when the left eye was bound up and the right ear stopped, there was no further avenue of stimulus to the patient's brain. When the latter experiment was actually carried out, the patient in about five minutes sank into a deep sleep, from which he could only be roused by the stimulus of light; he could not by shaking only. When he was left to himself, he awoke in the course of the day, after many hours' sleep, either through internal stimuli or from the excitation of the brain through slight and unavoidable stimuli from without. 