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putting up sticks with shavings or paper attached, in order to attract the attention of the spirits, is observable among certain hill tribes of India as well as among the Ainos of Yezo. The Hindoos, Burmese and Chinese have converted these sticks into flags and streamers. It was interesting to see from Mr. Satow’s paper how some of the customs and practises of the present day were connected with the earliest mythology of the Japanese, also to learn from it what a myth Jimmu was, whose reputed birth-day upwards of six hundred years B. C. was made the occasion only the other day for salutes from ships and batteries. He certainly did not agree with the estimate formed by Oliphant of the merits of Shintôism. If it had worked great results or had ever taken deep hold on the religious feeling of the Japanese people it would scarcely have been superseded so completely as it had been by Buddhism.
Rev. Dr. Brown said, he could but reiterate the statement of the gentlemen who had preceded him, for so far as he could learn Shintôism was in no proper sense of the term a religion. It would be strange, if during a residence of more than fourteen years in Japan, he had not endeavoured to inform himself upon this subject, but, as had been said by the President, Dr. Hepburn, his search for information in the literature of the country had been but poorly rewarded, unless he counted the discovery of the emptiness of Shintôism as a compensation for his pains. The Japanese books in which he had hoped to find something that would command his respect, had utterly disappointed him. The Kojiki is the only work that professedly treats of the subject in extenso, but it hardly repaid the trouble of perusal. Professing to go back to the origin of all things, it proves to be atheistical, for the first material substance wants a creator. The details of the cosmogony it treats of are puerile and unphilosophical. The Kojiki contains no system of morals, discusses no ethical questions, prescribes no ritual, or points to any god or gods as objects of worship. All the essentials of a religion are wanting in Shintôism, and it is difficult to see how it could have ever been denominated a religion at all. Besides, the Kojiki is acknowledged by Japanese historians to be the work of a female peasant, who was possessed of so extraordinary a memory, that she could repeat all the traditions she had ever heard verbatim et literatim, and when in A.D. 712, the dynastic records had ceased to be worthy of credence, this woman reproduced the ancient traditions from the beginning of all things down to her own times. The credibility of the work therefore rests upon no trustworthy foundation and criticism of such a book is destructive of its pretensions. It had been intimated in the remarks of one gentleman at this meeting, that Shintôism was of Chinese origin. If so, it must have originated in pre-historic times. But it has rather the look of an original Japanese invention, the resemblance in forms of worship between it and those that have existed among other people being more probably those similarities that in many other departments of life, such as the arts and implements of husbandry, tend to demonstrate the unity of the human
