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Rh III.

So much shall suffice here for the mute evidence of acts. But language has a word or two to say on the subject which, as a matter of courtesy, it may be well to admit. And first in the way of records.

The Kojiki and the Nihonshoki, known also as the Nihongi, are the oldest written records of the Japanese people. Compiled, the one in A.D. 712, the other in A.D. 720, they together constitute the Shintō bible, being different gospels, as it were, of much the same facts and fictions about the national past. Many of the fictions are doubtless founded on fact, though exactly how and even inexactly when, it would outwit mythology itself to state. There is at the beginning the usual attempt to make something out of nothing in order to account for the cosmos, much of which is probably Chinese. Then having got primeval chaos into something approaching order, the account gradually assumes consistency, till at last it becomes substantially history, of a far-oriental kind. As it begins with gods and ends with men, the evolution is not of the strictly