NOTE BY MISS YULE

I desire to take this opportunity of recording my grateful sense of the unsparing labour, learning, and devotion, with which my father’s valued friend, Professor Henri Cordier, has performed the difficult and delicate task which I entrusted to his loyal friendship.

Apart from Professor Cordier’s very special qualifications for the work, I feel sure that no other Editor could have been more entirely acceptable to my father.  I can give him no higher praise than to say that he has laboured in Yule’s own spirit.

The slight Memoir which I have contributed (for which I accept all responsibility), attempts no more than a rough sketch of my father’s character and career, but it will, I hope, serve to recall pleasantly his remarkable individuality to the few remaining who knew him in his prime, whilst it may also afford some idea of the man, and his work and environment, to those who had not that advantage.

No one can be more conscious than myself of its many shortcomings, which I will not attempt to excuse.  I can, however, honestly say that these have not been due to negligence, but are rather the blemishes almost inseparable from the fulfilment under the gloom of bereavement and amidst the pressure of other duties, of a task undertaken in more favourable circumstances.

Nevertheless, in spite of all defects, I believe this sketch to be such a record as my father would himself have approved, and I know also that he would have chosen my hand to write it.

In conclusion, I may note that the first edition of this work was dedicated to that very noble lady, the Queen (then Crown Princess) Margherita of Italy.  In the second edition the Dedication was reproduced within brackets (as also the original preface), but not renewed.  That precedent is again followed.

I have, therefore, felt at liberty to associate the present edition of my father’s work with the Name Murchison, which for more than a generation was the name most generally representative of British Science in Foreign Lands, as of Foreign Science in Britain.

A. F. Yule.

PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION

Little did I think, some thirty years ago, when I received a copy of the first edition of this grand work, that I should be one day entrusted with the difficult but glorious task of supervising the third edition.  When the first edition of the Book of Ser Marco Polo reached “Far Cathay,” it created quite a stir in the small circle of the learned foreigners, who then resided there, and became a starting-point for many researches, of which the results have been made use of partly in the second edition, and partly in the present.  The Archimandrite Palladius and Dr. E. Bretschneider, at Peking, Alex.  Wylie, at Shang-hai—­friends of mine who have, alas! passed away, with the exception of the Right Rev. Bishop G. E. Moule, of Hang-chau, the only survivor of this little group of hard-working scholars,—­were the first to explore the Chinese sources of information which were to yield a rich harvest into their hands.