remember once when out of sight of land calling the notice of our native valet to the masts of a vessel sinking below the horizon.  We pointed out to him that were the earth a perfectly flat surface its disappearance would not be so comparatively sudden, nor would the ship appear to sink.  But at the last moment, when we felt that conviction was entering into his soul and that another convert had been made to the great cause of scientific truth, he calmly replied that it was written—­“Heaven is round, earth is square,” and he didn’t very well understand how books could be wrong!

The sun is generally supposed to pass at sunset into the earth, and to come out next morning at the other side.  The moon is supposed to rise from and set in the ocean.  Earthquakes are held to result from explosions of sulphur in the heart of the earth; rain is said to be poured down by the Dragon God who usually resides on the other side of the clouds, and the rainbow is believed to be formed by the breath of an enormous oyster which lives somewhere in the middle of the sea, far away from land.  Comets and eclipses of the sun are looked upon as special warnings to the throne, and it is usual for some distinguished censor to memorialise the Emperor accordingly.  The most curious perhaps of all these popular superstitions are those which refer to thunder, lightning, and hail, regarded in China as the visitation of an angry and offended god.  In the first place it is supposed that people are struck by thunder and not by lightning—­a belief which was probably once prevalent in England, as evidenced by the English word thunderstruck.  Sir Philip Sydney writes:—­“I remained as a man thunder-stricken.”  Secondly, death by thunder is regarded as a punishment for some secret crime committed against human or divine law, and consequently a man who is not conscious of anything of the kind faces the elements without fear.  Away behind the clouds during a storm or typhoon sit the God of Thunder armed with his terrible bolts, and the Goddess of Lightning, holding in her hand a dazzling mirror.  With this last she throws a flash of lightning over the guilty man that the God of Thunder may see to strike his victim; the pealing crash which follows is caused by the passage through the air of the invisible shaft—­and the wrongs of Heaven are avenged.  Similarly, hail is looked upon as an instrument of punishment in the hands of the Hail God, directed only against the crops and possessions of such mortals as have by their wicked actions exposed themselves to the slow but certain visitation of divine vengeance.