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Not long ago a body of missionaries created a great deal of amusement by styling themselves, on the cover of some scientific tracts, as "famous savants" su ju (宿儒). The idea was of course extremely ridiculous. There is certainly not one Chinaman in the whole Empire who would venture to arrogate to himself the Chinese word ju, which includes in it all the highest attributes of a scholar or literary man. We often hear, however, a European spoken of as a Chinese scholar. In the advertisement of the China Review, we are told that "among the missionaries a high degree of Chinese scholarship is assiduously cultivated." A list is then given of regular contributors, "all," we are to believe, "well-known names, indicative of sound scholarship and thorough mastery of their subject."

Now in order to estimate the high degree of scholarship said to be assiduously cultivated by the missionary bodies in China, it is not necessary to take such high ideal standards as those propounded by the German Fichte in his lectures upon the Literary Man, or the American Emerson in his Literary Ethics. The late American Minister to Germany, Mr. Taylor, was acknowledged to be a great German scholar; but though an Englishman who has read a few plays of Schiller, or sent to a magazine some verses translated from Heine, might