adduced in its support.
I have related how the ancient Classics were cut on slabs of
stone by imperial order, A.D. 175, the text being that which the
various literati had determined, and which had been adopted by
Chang Hsuan. The same work was performed about seventy years
later, under the so-called dynasty of Wei, between the years 240
and 248, and the two sets of slabs were set up together. The only
difference between them was, that whereas the Classics had been
cut in the first instance only in one form, the characters in the
slabs of Wei were in three different forms. Amd the changes of
dynasties, the slabs both of Han and Wei had perished, or nearly
so, before the rise of the T'ang dynasty, A.D. 624; but under one of
its emperors, in the year 836, a copy of the Classics was again
cut on stone, though only in one form of the character. These
slabs we can trace down through the Sung dynasty, when they
were known as the tablets of Shen [1]. They were in exact
conformity with the text of the Classics adopted by Chang Hsuan
in his commentaries; and they exist at the present day at the city
of Hsi-an, Shen-hsi, still called by the same name.
The Sung dynasty did not accomplish a similar work itself,
nor did either of the two which followed it think it necessary to
engrave in stone in this way the ancient Classics. About the
middle of the sixteenth century, however, the literary world in
China was startled by a reprt that the slabs of Wei which
contained the Great Learning had been discovered. But this was
nothing more than the result f an impudent attempt at an
imposition, for which it is difficult to a foreigner to assign any
adequate cause. The treatise, as printed from these slabs, has
some trifling additions, and many alterations in the order of the
text, but differing from the arrangements proposed by Chu Hsi,