not the usual thin, paper-covered volumes of an ordinary Chinese work,
but they consist each of several of the original Chinese volumes bound
together in cloth or leather, lettered on the back, and standing on the
shelves, as our books do, instead of lying flat, as is the custom in
China.

Division A contains, first of all, the Confucian Canon, which now
consists of nine separate works.

There is the mystic _Book of Changes_, that is to say, the eight changes
or combinations which can be produced by a line and a broken line,
either one of which is repeated twice with the other, or three times by
itself.

--------- --- --- ---------
--------- --- --- --------- etc.
--- --- --------- ---------

These trigrams are said to have been copied from the back of a tortoise
by an ancient monarch, who doubled them into hexagrams, and so increased
the combinations to sixty-four, each one of which represents some active
or passive power in nature.

Confucius said that if he could devote fifty years to the study of this
work, he might come to be without great faults; but neither native nor
foreign scholars can really make anything out of it. Some regard it as a
Book of Fate. One erratic genius of the West has gone so far as to say
that it is only a vocabulary of the language of some old Central Asian
tribe.