A ramble through a native town in China must often have discovered to the observant foreigner small collections of second-hand books and pamphlets displayed on some umbrella-shaded stall, or arranged less pretentiously on the door-step of a temple.  If innocent of all claims to a knowledge of the written language, he may take them for cheap editions of Confucius, with which literary chair-coolies are wont to solace their leisure hours; at the worst, some of these myriad novels of which he has heard so much, and read—­in translations—­so little.  It possibly never enters our barbarian’s head that many of these itinerant book-sellers are vendors of educational works, much after the style of Pinnock’s Catechisms and other such guides to knowledge.  Buying a handful the other day for a few cash,[*] we were much amused at the nature of the subjects therein discussed, and the manner in which they were treated.  The first we opened was on Ethnology and Zoology, and gave an account of the wonderful types of men and beasts which exist in far-off regions beyond the pale of China and civilisation.  There was the long-legged nation, the people of which have legs three chang (thirty feet) long to support bodies of no more than ordinary size, followed by a short account of a cross-legged race, a term which explains itself.  We are next told of a country where all the inhabitants have a large round hole right through the middle of their bodies, the officials and wealthy citizens being easily and comfortably carried a la sedan chair by means of a strong bamboo pole passed through it.  Then there is the feathered or bird nation, the pictures of which people remind us very much of Lapps and Greenlanders.  A few lines are devoted to a pygmy race of nine-inch men, also to a people who walk with their bodies at an angle of 45 degrees.  There is the one-armed nation, and a three-headed nation, besides fish-bodied and bird-headed representatives of humanity; last but not least we have a race of beings without heads at all, their mouth, eyes, nose, &c., occupying their chests and pit of the stomach!

  “And of the cannibals that each other eat,
  The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
  Do grow beneath their shoulders.”

The little work which contains the above valuable information was published in 1783, and has consequently been nearly one hundred years before an enlightened and approving public.

    [*] About 24 cash go to a penny.

Not to dwell upon the remaining portion, devoted to Zoology, and containing wonderful specimens of various kinds of animals and birds met with by travellers beyond the Four Seas, we would remark that the geography of the world, notwithstanding some very fair existing treatises, is little studied by Chinese at the present day.  More works on topography have been written in Chinese than in probably any other language, but to say that even these are read is quite another matter.  Geography, properly so called, is almost entirely neglected, and in a rather extensive circle of literary acquaintances, it has never been our fortune to meet with a single scholar acquainted with the useful publications of Catholic or Protestant missionaries—­the latter have not contributed much—­except perhaps the mutilated edition of Verbiest’s little handbook.