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268 sturdy henchman. Old pictures show us the Emperor Go-Daigo fleeing in this guise somewhere about the year 1333. At that period the only known vehicles seem still to have been those lumbering bullock-carts so often pourtrayed in art, which had for centuries served the Japanese nobility in their pleasure parties round the old capital, Kyōto. But probably it was only round the capital that roads on which they could be used existed, nor were they in any case applicable to occasions demanding speed and secrecy.

 Kakke is the same disease as that known in India and the Malay peninsula under the name of beri-beri, and may be defined in popular language as a sort of paralysis, as it is characterised by loss of motive power and by numbness, especially in the extremities. It is often accompanied by dropsy. All these symptoms are due to a degeneration of the nerves, which is the main anatomical feature of the complaint. In severe cases it affects the heart, and may then become rapidly fatal, though the usual course of the disease extends over several months, and mostly ends in recovery. But he who has had one attack may expect another after an interval of a year or two. Some persons have had as many as ten or even twenty attacks, all setting in with the warm weather and disappearing in the autumn. Kakke attacks with special frequency and virulence young and otherwise healthy men,—women much less often, scarcely ever indeed except during pregnancy and after childbirth. Children of both sexes enjoy almost absolute immunity. The disease springs, in the opinion of some medical authorities, not from actual malaria, as was formerly imagined, but from a climatic influence resembling malaria. Others have sought its origin in the national diet,— some in rice, some in fish. In favour of this latter view is to be set the consideration that the peasantry, who often cannot afford either rice or fish, and have to eat barley or millet instead, suffer much less than the townsfolk, and the further fact that an extraordinary improvement in this respect has been observed in