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 mysterious manner, until in the beginning of the 15th century they were utilized to form an alphabet, for which the Sanscrit alphabet was taken as a model. From a Corean work written in the Chinese language, quoted by Itô Nagatane in the Sankan Kiriaku, the Corean alphabet appears to have been invented by a King of Corea who began to reign in 1419. But, if a Japanese alphabet ever existed, it had been entirely forgotten by the Japanese centuries before this date, and it is difficult to suppose that it should have been preserved by the Coreans in such a manner that they were still able after so long an interval, to assign what Hirata acknowledges to be very nearly the correct pronunciation to each letter. An alternative supposition of course, is that those of the so-called jindai no moji which are identical with combinations of the Corean letters were copied from that alphabet in comparatively modern times, and if we could obtain a sight of the original manuscripts said to be preserved at various Shintô temples in Japan, of which Hirata himself only had seen copies, it is probable that such conclusions might be drawn as to the age of the material on which they are written, as would serve to determine their value as authentic documents. Apart from these considerations it would hardly seem probable, arguing à priori, that the jindai no moji, which must have been alphabetic, should only he preserved in a syllabic form, as is the case with the specimens we speak of, or that the Japanese, if they had ever possessed such a treasure as an alphabet capable of expressing all the sounds of their language, should have abandoned it for the cumbrous method of ideographic writing which they afterwards learnt from the Chinese. The question is of some importance, for if it were decided in favour of Hirata’s views, we should be compelled to allow a greater degree of credibility to the earlier historical records of Japan than there seems at present reason to attribute to them.

Hitherto the teaching of Hirata has not appeared to differ much in principle from that of his predecessors, whose object was to preserve from oblivion the ancient