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Rh represented by Kaempfer, Thunberg, Siebold, and even Rein, is a certain insufficiency of the critical faculty in questions of history and language. Surely it is not enough to get at the Japanese sources. The Japanese sources must themselves be subjected to rigorous scrutiny. It was reserved for the English school, represented by Satow and Aston, to do this,—to explore the language with scientific exactness, and to prove, step by step, that the so-called history, which Kaempfer and his followers had taken on trust, was a mass of old wives fables. More recently, however, Riess, Florenz, and others have gained for German scholarship bright laurels in this field also.

 Silk. The silkworm was still a rare novelty at the dawn of Japanese history,—just imported, as it would seem, from Korea. The first mention of it is in the annals of the reign of the Emperor Nintoku, who is supposed to have died in A.D. 399. Up till then, the materials used for clothing had been hempen cloth and the bark of the paper-mulberry, coloured by being rubbed with madder and other tinctorial plants. The testimony of Japanese tradition to the foreign origin of silk, and its absence here in earlier ages, go to support the results of modern research to the effect that neither the true silkworm nor the mulberry-tree on whose leaves it feeds ever occurs wild in this archipelago. Striking change indeed! Silk has, for at least thirteen hundred years, helped to dress the Japanese upper classes, male as well as female, and has come to form the chief mainstay of the national prosperity.

The Japanese silkworm moth is the Bombyx mori, L.; its mulberry-tree the "white mulberry,"—Morus alba, L. Insect and tree have alike developed several varieties under cultivation. As a rule the trees ars [sic] pollarded, and Japanese thrift takes advantage of the space between the stumps to grow small crops of useful vegetables. The branches are generally carried home for stripping.