coarse, and cylindrical; the beard scanty or absent. The colour of
the skin is darker in the south than in the north.

Emotionally the Chinese are sober, industrious, of remarkable
endurance, grateful, courteous, and ceremonious, with a high sense
of mercantile honour, but timorous, cruel, unsympathetic, mendacious,
and libidinous.

Intellectually they were until recently, and to a large extent
still are, non-progressive, in bondage to uniformity and mechanism
in culture, imitative, unimaginative, torpid, indirect, suspicious,
and superstitious.

The character is being modified by intercourse with other peoples
of the earth and by the strong force of physical, intellectual,
and moral education.


Marriage in Early Times

Certain parts of the marriage ceremonial of China as now existing
indicate that the original form of marriage was by capture--of which,
indeed, there is evidence in the classical _Book of Odes_. But a
regular form of marriage (in reality a contract of sale) is shown
to have existed in the earliest historical times. The form was not
monogamous, though it seems soon to have assumed that of a qualified
monogamy consisting of one wife and one or more concubines, the
number of the latter being as a rule limited only by the means of the
husband. The higher the rank the larger was the number of concubines
and handmaids in addition to the wife proper, the palaces of the