digested under the same divisions as in the present classic, existed
before the sage's time.

3. i. It would not be surprising, if, floating about and current among
the people of China in the sixth century before our era, there had been
more than 3000 pieces of poetry. The marvel is that such was not the
case. But in the Narratives of the States, a work of the Kau dynasty,
and ascribed by many to Zo Khiu-ming, there occur quotations from
thirty-one poems, made by statesmen and others, all anterior to
Confucius; and of those poems there are not more than two which are not
in the present classic. Even of those two, one is an ode of it quoted
under another name. Further, in the Zo Kwan, certainly the work of
Khiu-ming, we have quotations from not fewer than 219 poems, of which
only thirteen are not found in the classic. Thus of 250 poems current in
China before the supposed compilation of the Shih, 236 are found in it,
and only fourteen are absent. To use the words of Kao Yi, a scholar of
the present dynasty, 'If the poems existing in Confucius' time had been
more than 3000, the quotations of poems now lost in these two works
should have been ten times as numerous as the quotations from the 305
pieces said to have been preserved by him, whereas they are only between
a twenty-first and twenty-second part of the existing pieces. This is
sufficient to show that Khien's statement is not worthy of credit.'

ii. Of the existence of the Book of Poetry before Confucius, digested in
four Parts, and much in the same order as at present, there may be
advanced the following proofs:--

First. There is the passage in the Official Book of Kau, quoted and
discussed in the last paragraph of the preceding chapter. We have in it
a distinct reference to poems, many centuries before the sage, arranged