principles evolved from the brains of the imaginative founders of the science.  It is the business of the geomancer to discover such sites, to say if a given locality is or is not all that could be desired on this head, sometimes to correct errors which ignorant quacks have committed, or rectify inaccuracies which have escaped the notice even of the most celebrated among the fraternity.  There may be too many trees, so that some must be cut down; or there may be too few, and it becomes necessary to plant more.  Water-courses may not flow in proper curves; hills may be too high, too low, and of baleful shapes, or their relative positions one with another may be radically bad.  Any one of these causes may be sufficient in the eyes of a disciple of Feng-shui to account for the sudden outbreak of a plague, the gradual or rapid decay of a once flourishing town.  The Feng-shui of a house influences not only the pecuniary fortunes of its inmates, but determines their general happiness and longevity.  There was a room in the British Legation at Peking in which two persons died with no great interval of time between each event; and subsequently one of the students lay there in articulo mortis for many days.  The Chinese then pointed out that a tall chimney had been built opposite the door leading into this room, thereby vitiating the Feng-shui, and making the place uninhabitable by mortal man.

From the above most meagre sketch it is easy to understand that if the natural or artificial configuration of surrounding objects is really believed by the Chinese to influence the fortunes of a city, a family, or an individual, they are only reasonably averse to the introduction of such novelties as railways and telegraph poles, which must inevitably sweep away their darling superstition—­never to rise again.  And they do believe; there can be no doubt of it in the mind of any one who has taken the trouble to watch.  The endless inconvenience a Chinaman will suffer without a murmur rather than lay the bones of a dear one in a spot unhallowed by the fiat of the geomancer; the sums he will subscribe to build a protecting pagoda or destroy some harmful combination; the pains he will be at to comply with well-known principles in the construction and arrangement of his private house—­all prove that the iron of Feng-shui has entered into his soul, and that the creed he has been suckled in is the very reverse of outworn.  The childlike faith of his early years gradually ripens into a strong and vigorous belief against which ridicule is perhaps the worst weapon that can possibly be used.  Nothing less than years of contact with foreign nations and deep draughts of that real science which is even now stealing imperceptibly upon them, will bring the Chinese to see that Feng-shui is a vain shadow, that it has played its allotted part in the history of a great nation, and is now only fit to be classed with such memories of by-gone glory as the supremacy of China, the bow and arrow, the matchlock, and the junk.